BEYOND the POSTMODERN MIND

HUSTON SMITH

BEYOND the POSTMODERN MINDThe Place of Meaningin a Global Civilization

Updated and Revised

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Copyright © 1982, 1989, 2003 by Huston SmithFirst Quest Edition 1984Second Edition 1989Third Edition 2003

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Huston.Beyond the postmodern mind: the place of meaning in a global civilization / Huston Smith.—3rd Quest ed.p. cm.Rev. ed. of: Beyond the post-modern mind. c1989.Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 0-8356-0830-11. Philosophy, Modern—20th century. 2. Postmodernism. I. Smith,Huston. Beyond the post-modern mind. II. Title.B804.S576 2003190'.9'04—dc21

2003041588 ISBN for electronic edition, e-pub format: 978-0-8356-2078-9

4 3 2 1 * 03 04 05 06 07 08

In memory of Serena Karlan, and for the future that Sierra and Isaiah Senyak and AntonioBanuelos token

CONTENTS

Preface to the Third Edition

Acknowledgments

Part One: DARK WOOD

1. On Living without Order:The Revolution in Western Thought

2. Philosophy’s Struggle with Disorder:Metaphysics and the Post-Nietzschean Deconstruction Thereof

Part Two: A CLEARING

3. The Stable Backdrop:Perennial Philosophy, Primordial Tradition

Part Three: LOOKING AROUND: A View of Our Times

4. Higher Education:Excluded Knowledge

5. The Humanities:Flakes of Fire, Handfuls of Light

6. Philosophy:The Contemporary Crisis

7. Theology:The Unstable Détente with Science

8. Science:The Dispute over Evolution

9. Society:The Relevance of the Great Religions for the Modern World

Part Four: THE WAY OUT

10. Beyond the Modern Western Mind-set11. Beyond Postmodernism12. The Sacred Unconscious13. The Incredible Assumption

Epilogue: Exploring Religious FrontiersNotes

Preface to the Third Edition

“If, by some strange device, a man of our century could step backwards in time and mix with thepeople of a distant age,” Gai Eaton wrote in The King of the Castle, “he would have good cause todoubt either their sanity or his own” (p. 7). The sun’s daily cycle, a raven’s flight, mossy oaks, andwater gushing from a glade would look familiar enough, but the meanings they carried for his newassociates would be different. Each would think he knew what constitutes common sense and humannormality, but their common sense would differ from his and their normality might seem to himabnormal. Questioning everything they took for granted and astonished that they did not see how muchtheir conclusions were controlled by arbitrary assumptions, he would find everything he took forgranted similarly called into question. His “Why?” would be met with their “Why?”, and he wouldhave no answer.

The essays here assembled attempt a move like the one just envisioned: they invite us to stepoutside our current Western outlook to see it in perspective. The limitations of earlier outlooks are soobvious that we forget that ours, too, is built on premises history will smile on. Science and thehistorical record we now possess may seem to exempt us from the perspectival character of humanvision, but we know, of course, that they do not. Like those who have lived before us, we too havefished certain objectives from the sea of human possibilities. These in turn have firmed up premisesthat support them, and from these premises an entire outlook has been spun—such possibilities arewhat these essays try to show. To compare our worldview with others is not to set light againstshadow. It is to compare twilight zones; different kinds of limitations, “as though a man tunneling hisway out of prison were to emerge within the perimeter, exchanging one cell for another. So it mustalways be,” Eaton concludes, “unless the prisoner learns that freedom lies in quite another direction,never through the tunnel of time” (ibid.).

We shall encounter this other, atemporal and noncumulative dimension of knowledge in Part Twoof this book. Here the point is that the stages peoples’ outlooks pass through on the temporalcontinuum have led the West to one that has come to be called “Postmodern” to distinguish it from theModernity that began in the seventeenth century and ended around the middle of the last century. TheModern Mind took its cues from the new worldview that science introduced, but twenty-first-centuryscience has abandoned not just that worldview, but worldviews generally. From Aristotle to Dante,the world was pictured as a series of concentric spheres. Newton replaced that with his clockworkuniverse, but quantum mechanics gives us, not a new picture of the world, but no picture at all. Andphilosophy has followed suit. Metaphysics died around the time that God died, Langdon Gilkey hasobserved, tying its death to the “death of God” movement that Nietzsche announced, but which took ahalf-century to come to public notice.

The essays in this book work toward bringing the world back into focus, and as the view that

emerges resembles traditional ones more than it does either the Modern worldview or Postmodernlack thereof, the presumption that these latter have permanently retired the way people used to seethings needs to be questioned at the outset. The ways in which Modernity and Postmodernity haveassumed that their perspectives were less limited than previous ones turn out to be diametricallyopposed to each other. Whereas the Modern Mind assumed that it knew more than its predecessorsbecause the natural and historical sciences were flooding it with new knowledge about nature andhistory, the Postmodern Mind argues (paradoxically) that it knows more than others did because it hasdiscovered how little the human mind can know. “How well we now know how little we know.” weshall find James Cutsinger noting in chapter 2.

It is a good part of this book’s intent to question these dual—and to repeat, contradictory—claims to superiority. The Modern Mind’s mistake was to think that seeing further in a horizontaldirection would compensate for loss of the vertical dimension. If we visualize a line that wandersupward and then downward again to silhouette the Himalayan range, it is as if Modernity grabbedhold of both ends of that line and stretched them apart. This collapsed the humps to a straight linealong the base of the range, but Modernity reasoned that since that line could be indefinitely extended,it would enclose a volume greater than the one the line originally defined.

For the error of Postmodernism, we can visualize the same Himalayan range, but this time workwith it differently. We are now inside a bungalow looking out on Mount Everest’s awesome presence.The air is cold outside, so our breath begins to fog the window. Ventilation is poor, causing themoisture on the pane to condense until at some point it becomes difficult to determine whether theshapes we see are mountains or frosted textures of our own breath as it congeals on the pane. Visitorsarrive. Not having gazed through the window when it was clear, they do not know what lies beyond it,so they fix on the foreground, assuming unthinkingly that shapes they see are on the windowpane only.Put straightforwardly, the mistake of Postmodernism is to assume that human beings look out on theworld through windows so befogged that it would be unwise to assume that what they see is in theworld itself.

Part One of the book is historical. It traces the course of Western civilization that has brought itto the Postmodern period.

Part Two establishes a vantage point for viewing the Modern/Postmodern scene.Part Three attends to the facets of that scene that have engaged me most: higher education, the

place of the humanities within that education, theology, science, and the place of social concerns.Although Modernity and Postmodernity can be clearly distinguished in principle, practically—in theactual ethos of our time—there is a great deal of overlap which the essays in this section of the bookmust sort out.

Part Four offers suggestions for clearing up confusions that bedeviled the twentieth century andare still with us. An epilogue has been added to this third edition of the book.

To try to step outside the perspective of one’s own culture is a little like trying to step out of theshoes one is walking in. My talents for the move are no greater than the next person’s, butcircumstances have been in my favor. I was born and raised in a foreign and traditional society—China—yet the longest stretch of my career was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aspearhead of the modern Western, scientific age. Two worlds were thereby joined. If the slant of theseessays seems surprising at points, the reason may lie in that intersection.

Two “housekeeping” details: All but two of these essays initially appeared elsewhere. I haveedited them slightly to fit the book’s trajectory, but I have not removed all the overlaps that occur inessays that approach different problems from a single angle and were written for different audiences.Doing so would have violated the integrity of the essays themselves, but another consideration alsoentered. When the reader comes upon an image or quotation that is being repeated, s/he will do wellto take it as a signal. I am repeating myself to emphasize the point that is being made.

The slashed pronoun “s/he” that just appeared introduces the second stylistic point. In thisawkward time of respecting gender pronouns, I have not tried to be consistent in my use of them.Where I have not found uncumbersome ways to invoke gender-inclusive language, I have alternatedbetween ideological and stylistic considerations.

Acknowledgments

Had it not been for the initiative of Richard Payne, then of The Crossroad Publishing Company, andhis consultant Ewert Cousins, the first edition of this book would not have taken form. Had notDouglas Sloan, editor of the Teachers College Record, requested “Excluded Knowledge” and he andthe Charles F. Kettering Foundation commissioned “Beyond the Modern Western Mindset,” thoseessays would not have been written. Most of these essays were written while I was teaching atSyracuse University where my colleagues and graduate students provided high-spirited criticisms andbasic support. My semester as visiting professor at Villanova University helped me to write chapter9, and Quest Books took the initiative in proposing this third edition. Kendra Smith, whose husband Iam, is gifted with an editorial eye that improves with each of my successive books. To all of these,my sincerest thanks.

Part One

DARK WOOD

If we think of contemporary Westerners from all walks of life and the numberless directions inwhich their hopes and thoughts extend, we can only conclude what has become a truism: nocomprehensive vision, no concerted sense of reality, informs our age. The opening lines of Dante’sDivine Comedy could have been written for our twenty-first-century s Everyman:

Midway this way of life we’re bound uponI woke to find myself in a dark wood,Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

A century ago, John Dewey pointed to “despair of any integrated outlook and attitude [as]the chief intellectual characteristic of the present age,” and every succeeding decade has bornehim out. Heidegger believed that ages are powered by works of art that gather scattered practicesinto unified, persuasive models for behavior and hold them before people who can then relate toeach other along the lines they exemplify. Our age, though, he felt, is the first whose paradigm is awork, not of art but of technology: the hydroelectric power station. Being a technologicalconstruct, it is value free. The power station converts the river’s power into a grid that places it atthe disposal of any purpose whatever. As electricity can be used to satisfy any desire we happen tohave, this paradigm provides no directives or motivation for action at all. The consequence is avacuum of meaning and purpose, as Saul Bellow, too, noted in his 1976 Nobel Laureate Lecture:

The intelligent public is waiting to hear from Art what it does not hear from Theology, Philosophy, Social Theory, and what itcannot hear from pure science: a broader, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are,who we are, and what this life is for. If writers do not come into the center it will not be because the center is preempted. Itis not.

I used an invitation from The Saturday Evening Post to contribute to its “Adventures of theMind” series as occasion to trace the intellectual odyssey that has this empty center.

1

On Living without Order:The Revolution in Western Thought

Quietly, irrevocably, something enormous has happened to Western humanity. Its outlook on life andthe world has changed so radically that in the perspective of history the twentieth century and now thetwenty-first are likely to rank—with the fourth century, which witnessed the triumph of Christianity,and the seventeenth, which signaled the dawn of modern science—as one of the very few that haveinstigated genuinely new epochs in human thought. In this change, which is still in process, we whowrite and read these words are playing a crucial but as yet not widely recognized part.

The dominant assumptions of an age color the thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and images of themen and women who live within it. Being always with us, these assumptions usually pass unnoticed—like the pair of glasses which, because they are so often on the wearer’s nose, simply stop beingobserved. But this doesn’t mean they have no effect. Ultimately, assumptions which underlie ouroutlooks on life refract the world in ways that condition our art and our institutions: the kinds ofhomes we live in, our sense of right and wrong, our criteria of success, what we conceive our duty tobe, what we think it means to be a man or woman, how we worship our God, or whether, indeed, wehave a God to worship.

Thus far the odyssey of Western people has carried them through three great configurations ofsuch basic assumptions. The first constituted the Graeco-Roman, or classical, outlook, whichflourished up to the fourth century A.D. With the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire, thisGraeco-Roman outlook was replaced by the Christian worldview which proceeded to dominateEurope until the seventeenth century. The rise of modern science inaugurated a third important way oflooking at things, a way that has come to be encapsulated in the phrase “the Modern Mind.”

It now appears that this modern outlook, too, has run its course and is being replaced by what, inthe absence of a more descriptive term, is simply being called Postmodernism. What follows is anattempt to describe this most recent sea change in Western thought. I shall begin by bringing theChristian and modern outlooks into focus; for only so can we see how and to what extent ouremerging thought patterns differ from those that have directly preceded them.

From the fourth-century triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire through the Middle Agesand the Reformation, the Western mind was above all else theistic. “God, God, God; nothing butGod”—in the twentieth century one can assume such an exclamation to have come, as it did, from atheologian. In the Middle Ages, it could have come from anyone. Virtually without question all lifeand nature were assumed to be under the surveillance of a personal God whose intentions toward manwere perfect and whose power to implement these intentions was unlimited.

In such a world, life was transparently meaningful. But although people understood the purposeof their lives, it does not follow that they understood, or even presumed to be capable ofunderstanding, the dynamics of the natural world. The Bible never expands the doctrine of creationinto a cosmology for the excellent reason that it asserts the universe to be at every point the directproduct of a will whose ways are not man’s ways. God says, “Let there be”—and there is. That is all.Serene in a blaze of lasting light, God comprehends nature’s ways, but man sees only its surface.

Christian man lived in the world as a child lives in his parents’ house, accepting its doingsunprobed. “Can anyone understand the thunderings of God’s pavilion?” Elihu asks Job. “Do you knowthe ordinances of the heavens, how the clouds are balanced or the lightning shines? Have youcomprehended the expanse of the earth, or on what its bases were sunk when the morning stars sangtogether and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” To such rhetorical questions the answer seemedobvious. The leviathan of nature was not to be drawn from the great sea of mystery by the fishhook ofman’s paltry mind.

Not until the high Middle Ages was a Christian cosmology attempted, and then through Greekrather than biblical inspiration, following the rediscovery of Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics.Meanwhile nature’s obscurity posed no major problem, for as the cosmos was in good hands, it couldbe counted on to furnish a reliable context in which man might work out his salvation. The way to thissalvation lay not through ordering nature to humanity’s purposes but through aligning humanity’spurposes to God’s. And for this objective, information was at hand. As surely as God had kept thesecrets of nature to himself, he had, through his divine Word and the teachings of his Church, mademan’s duty clear. Those who hearkened to this duty would reap an eternal reward, but those whorefused to do so would perish.

We can summarize the chief assumptions underlying the Christian outlook by saying they heldthat reality is focused in a personal God, that the mechanics of the physical world exceed ourcomprehension, and that the way to our salvation lies not in conquering nature but in following thecommandments which God has revealed to us.

It was the second of these three assumptions—that the dynamics of nature exceed man’scomprehension—which the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries began to question, thereby heraldingthe transition from the Christian to the modern outlook. Renaissance interest in the early Greeksrevived the Hellenic interest in nature and for the first time in nearly two thousand years, Western manbegan to look intently at his environment instead of beyond it. Leonardo da Vinci is symbolic. Hisanatomical studies and drawings in general disclose a direction of interest that has turned eye intocamera, in his case an extraordinary camera that could stop the hawk in flight and fix the rearingsteed. Once again humankind was attending to nature’s details as a potential messenger of meaning.The rage to know God’s handiwork was rivaling the rage to know God himself.

The consequence, as we know, was modern science. Under scrutiny, nature’s blur was found tobe provisional rather than final. With patience, the structure of the universe could be brought intomarvelous focus. Newton’s exclamation caught the excitement perfectly: “O God, I think thy thoughtsafter thee!” Although nature’s marvels were infinitely greater than had been supposed, man’s mindwas equal to them. The universe was a coherent, law-abiding system. It was intelligible!

It was not long before this discovery began to reap practical rewards. Drudgery could berelieved, health improved, goods multiplied, and leisure extended. As these are considerablebenefits, working with intelligible nature began to overshadow obedience to God’s will as a means to

human fulfillment. God was not entirely eclipsed—that would have entailed a break with the pastmore violent than history allows. Rather, God was eased toward thought’s periphery. Not atheism butdeism, the notion that God created the world but left it to run according to its own inbuilt laws, wasthe Modern Mind’s distinctive religious stance. God stood behind nature as its creator, but it wasthrough nature that his ways were to be known.

Like the Christian outlook, the Modern outlook can be summarized by identifying its threecontrolling presuppositions. First, that reality may be personal is less certain and less important thanthat it is ordered. Second, man’s reason is capable of discerning this order as it manifests itself in thelaws of nature. Third, the path to human fulfillment consists primarily in discovering these laws,harnessing them where this is possible, and complying with them where it is not.

The reason for suspecting that this Modern outlook has had its day and is yielding to a third greatwave in Western thought is that reflective men are no longer confident of any of these three postulates.The first two are the ones that concern us here. Frontier thinkers are no longer sure that reality isordered and orderly. If it is, they are not sure that man’s mind is capable of grasping its order.Combining these two doubts, we can define the Postmodern Mind as one which, having lost theconviction that reality is personal, has come to question whether it is ordered in a way that man’sreason can lay bare.

It was science which induced our forefathers to think of reality as primarily ordered rather thanpersonal. But contemporary science has crashed through the cosmology which the seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century scientists constructed as if through a sound barrier, leaving us without replacement.It is tempting to attribute this lack to the fact that evidence is pouring in faster than we can throw itinto perspective. Although this is part of the problem, another part runs deeper. Basically, the absenceof a new cosmology is due to the fact that physics has cut away so radically from our capacity toimagine the way things are that we do not see how the two can get back together.

If modern physics showed us a world at odds with our senses, postmodern physics is showing usone which is at odds with our imagination, where imagination is taken as imagery. We have madepeace with the first of these oddities. That the table which appears motionless is in fact incredibly“alive” with electrons circling their nuclei a million billion times per second; that the chair whichfeels so secure beneath us is actually a near vacuum—such facts, while certainly very strange, posedno permanent problem for man’s sense of order. To accommodate them, all that was necessary was toreplace the earlier picture of a gross and ponderous world with a subtle world in which all wassprightly dance and airy whirl.

But the problems the new physics poses for humanity’s sense of order cannot be resolved byrefinements in scale. Instead they appear to point to a radical disjunction between the way thingsbehave and every possible way in which we might try to visualize them. How, for example, are we topicture an electron traveling two or more different routes through space concurrently, or passing fromorbit to orbit without traversing the intervening space? What kind of model can we construct of aspace that is finite yet unbounded, or of light which is both wave and particle? It is such enigmas thatcaused physicists like P. W. Bridgman of Harvard to suggest that “the structure of nature mayeventually be such that our processes of thought do not correspond to it sufficiently to permit us tothink about it at all.…The world fades out and eludes us.…We are confronted with something trulyineffable. We have reached the limit of the vision of the great pioneers of science, the vision, namely,that we live in a sympathetic world in that it is comprehensible by our minds.”

This subdued and problematic stance of science toward reality is paralleled in philosophy. Noone who works in philosophy today can fail to realize that the sense of the cosmos has been shaken byan encyclopedic skepticism. The clearest evidence of this is the collapse of what historically hasbeen philosophy’s central discipline: objective metaphysics, the attempt to discover what realityconsists of and the most general principles which describe the way its parts are related. In thisrespect, Alfred North Whitehead marked the end of an era. His Process and Reality: An Essay inCosmology is the last important attempt to construct a logical, coherent scheme of ideas that wouldblueprint the universe. The trend throughout the twentieth century was away from faith in thefeasibility of such undertakings. As a tendency throughout philosophy as a whole, this is arevolutionary development. For twenty-five hundred years philosophers have argued over whichmetaphysical system is true. For them to agree that none is true is a new departure. Richard Rortycaptures this departure in five words. “There is no Big Picture,” the University of Chicago AlumniMagazine quotes him as saying in the cover story it devoted to him in its issue that marked thepassage into the twenty-first century.

The agreement represents the confluence of several philosophical streams. On one hand, it hascome from the positivists who, convinced that truth comes only from science, challenged themetaphysician’s claim to extrascientific sources of insight. Their successors were the linguisticanalysts, who dominated British philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century and who (insofar asthey followed their pioneering genius Ludwig Wittgenstein) regarded all philosophical perplexities asgenerated by slovenly uses of language. For the analysts, “reality” and “being in general” are notionstoo thin and vapid to reward analysis. As a leading American proponent of this position, ProfessorMorton White of Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study puts it, “It took philosophers a long time torealize that the number of interesting things that one can say about all things in one fell swoop is verylimited. Through the effort to become supremely general, you lapse into emptiness.”

Equal but quite different objections to metaphysics came from the existentialists who dominatedtwentieth-century European philosophy. Heirs of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevski, thesephilosophers wanted to remind their colleagues of what it means to be a human being. When we arethus reminded, they said, we see that to be human precludes in principle the kind of objective andimpartial overview of things—the view of things as they are in themselves, apart from our differingperspectives—that metaphysics has always sought. To be human is to be finite, conditioned, andunique. No two persons have had their lives shaped by the same concatenation of genetic, cultural,historical, and interpersonal forces. Either these variables are inconsequential—but if we say this weare forgetting again what it means to be human, for our humanity is in fact overwhelmingly shaped bythem—or the hope of rising to a God’s-eye view of reality is misguided in principle.

The traditional philosopher might protest that in seeking such an overview he never expectedperfection, but that we ought to try to make our perspectives as objective as possible. Such a responsewould only lead the existentialist to press his point deeper; for his contention is not just thatobjectivity is impossible but that it runs so counter to our nature—to what it means to be human—thatevery step in its direction is a step away from our humanity. (We are speaking here of objectivity as itpertains to our lives as wholes, not to restricted spheres of endeavor within them such as science. Inthese latter areas objectivity can be an unqualified virtue.) If the journey held hope that in ceasing tobe human we might become gods, there could be no objection. But as this is impossible, ceasing to behuman can only mean becoming less than human—inhuman in the usual sense of the word. It means

forfeiting through inattention the birthright that is ours: the opportunity to plumb the depths andimplications of what it means to have an outlook on life, which, in important respects, is unique andwill never be duplicated.

Despite the existentialist’s sharp rebuke to metaphysics and traditional philosophy in general,there is at least one important point at which he respects their aims. He agrees that it is important totranscend what is accidental and ephemeral in our outlooks and in his own way joins his colleaguesof the past in attempting to do so. But the existentialist’s way toward this goal does not consist intrying to climb out of his skin in order to rise to Olympian heights from which things can be seen withcomplete objectivity and detachment. Rather, it consists in centering on his own inwardness until hefinds within it what he is compelled to accept and can never get away from. In this way he, too,arrives at what he judges to be necessary and eternal. But necessary and eternal for him. What isnecessary and eternal for everyone is so impossible for a man to know that he wastes time making theattempt.

With this last insistence the existentialist establishes contact with the metaphysical skepticism ofhis analytic colleagues across the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. Existentialism (and itsfrequent but not invariable partner, phenomenology) and analytic philosophy were the two dominantmovements in twentieth-century philosophy. In temperament, interest, and method they stood atopposite poles of the philosophical spectrum. They were, in fact, opposites in every sense but one.Both are creatures of the Postmodern Mind, the mind which doubts that reality has an absolute orderwhich man’s understanding can comprehend.

Turning from philosophy to theology, we recall that the Modern Mind did not rule out thepossibility of God; it merely referred the question to its highest court of appeal—namely, reality’spattern as disclosed by reason. If the world order entails the notions of providence and a creator, Godexists; otherwise not. This approach made the attempt to prove God’s existence through reason andnature the major theological thrust of the modern period. “Let us,” wrote Bishop Joseph Butler in hisfamous The Analogy of Religion, “compare the known constitution and course of things…with whatreligion teaches us to believe and expect; and see whether they are not analogous and of a piece.…Itwill, I think, be found that they are very much so.” An enterprising Franciscan named Ramon Llullwent even further. He invented a kind of primitive computer which, with the turning of cranks, pullingof levers, and revolving of wheels, would sort the theological subjects and predicates fed into it insuch a way as to demonstrate the truths of the Trinity and the Incarnation by force of sheer logicworking on self-evident propositions. Rationalism had entered theology as early as the Middle Ages,but as long as the Christian outlook prevailed, final confidence was reserved for the directpronouncements of God himself as given in Scripture. In the Modern period, God’s existence came tostand or fall on whether reason, surveying the order of nature, endorsed it. It was as if Christendomand God himself awaited the verdict of science and the philosophers.

This hardly describes the current theological situation. Scientists and philosophers have ceasedto issue pronouncements of any sort about ultimates. Postmodern theology builds on its ownfoundations. Instead of attempting to justify faith by appeals to the objective world, it points out thatas such appeals indicate nothing about reality one way or the other, the way is wide open for freedecision—or what Kierkegaard called the leap of faith. One hears little these days of the proofs forthe existence of God which seemed so important to the modern world. Instead, one hears repeatedinsistence that however admirably reason is fitted to deal with life’s practical problems, it can only

end with a confession of ignorance when confronted with questions of ultimate concern. In the famousdictum of Karl Barth, who influenced twentieth-century theology more than anyone else, there is nostraight line from the mind of man to God. “What we say breaks apart constantly…producingparadoxes which are held together in seeming unity only by agile and arduous running to and fro onour part.” From the United States Reinhold Niebuhr echoed this conviction. “Life is full ofcontradictions and incongruities. We live our lives in various realms of meaning which do not cohererationally.”

Instead of “these are the compelling reasons, grounded in the nature of things, why you shouldbelieve in God’ the approach of the Church to the world today tends to be, “This community of faithinvites you to share in its venture of trust and commitment.” The stance is most evident in Protestantand Orthodox Christianity and Judaism, but even Roman Catholic thought, notwithstanding thepowerful rationalism it took over from the Greeks, has not remained untouched by the Postmodernperspective. It has become more attentive to the extent to which personal and subjective factorsprovide the disposition to faith without which theological arguments prove nothing.

It is difficult to assess the mood which accompanies this theological revolution. On one hand,there seems to be a heightened sense of faith’s precariousness: as Jesus walked on the water, so mustthe contemporary person of faith walk on the sea of nothingness, confident even in the absence ofrational supports. But vigor is present, too. Having labored in the shadow of rationalism during theModern period, contemporary theology is capitalizing on its restored autonomy. Compensating forloss of rational proofs for God’s existence have come two gains. One is new realization of thevalidity of Pascal’s “reasons of the heart that the mind knows not of.” The other is a recovery of theawe without which religion, as distinct from ethical philosophy piously expressed, is probablyimpossible. By including God within a closed system of rational explanation, modernism lost sight ofthe endless qualitative distinction between God and man. Postmodern theology has reinstated thisdistinction with great force. If God exists, the fact that our minds cannot begin to comprehend hisnature makes it necessary for us to acknowledge that he is Wholly Other.

These revolutions in science, philosophy, and theology have not left the arts unaffected. Theworlds of the major twentieth-century artists are many and varied, but none resembles the eighteenth-century world where mysteries seemed to be clearing by the hour. The twentieth-century worlds defylucid and coherent exegesis. Paradoxical, devoid of sense, they are worlds into which protagonistsare thrown without trace as to why—the world which the French novelist Albert Camus proclaimed“absurd,” which for his compatriot Jean-Paul Sartre was de trop (“too much”), and for the Irishdramatist Samuel Beckett is a “void” in which men wait out their lives for a what-they-know-not thatnever comes. Heroes driven by a veritable obsession to find out where they are and what theirresponsibility is seldom succeed. Most of Franz Kafka is ambiguous, but his parable, “Before theLaw,” closes with as clear a countermand to the modern vision of an ordered reality as can beimagined. “The world-order is based on a lie.”

Objective morality has gone the way of cosmic order. Even where it has not been moralistic,most Western art of the past was created against the backdrop of objective values which the artistshared. Now it is difficult to find a framework that supports the arts.

A single example will illustrate the point. One searches in vain for an artistic frame of referenceprior to the twentieth century in which matricide might be regarded as a moral act. Yet in Sartre’splay The Flies, it is the first authentic deed the protagonist Orestes performs. Whereas his previous

actions have been detached, unthinking, or in conformity with the habit patterns that surround him, thisone is freely chosen in the light of full self-consciousness and acceptance of its consequences. Assuch, it is the first act which is genuinely his. “I have done my deed, Electra,” he exults, adding “andthat deed was good.” Being his, the deed supplies his life with the identity which until then it hadlacked. From that moment forward, Orestes ceases to be a free-floating form; his acquisition of a pasthe can never escape roots his life into reality. Note the extent to which this analysis relativizes themoral standard. No act is right or wrong in itself. Everything depends on its relation to the agent,whether it is chosen freely and with full acceptance of its consequences or is done in imitation of theacts of others, or in self-deception.

We move beyond morality into art proper when we note that the traditional distinction betweenthe sublime and the banal, too, has blurred. As long as reality was conceived as a great chain of being—a hierarchy of worth descending from God as its crown through angels, people, animals, and plantsto inanimate objects at the base—it could be reasonably argued that great art should attend to greatsubjects: scenes from the Gospels, major battles, or distinguished lords and ladies. With cubism andsurrealism, the distinction between trivial and important disappears. Alarm clocks, driftwood, andpieces of broken glass become appropriate subjects for the most monumental paintings. In SamuelBeckett and the contemporary French antinovelists, the most mundane items—miscellaneous contentsof a pocket, a wastebasket, the random excursions of a runaway dog—are treated with the same careas love, duty, or the question of human destiny. Andy Warhol’s realistic painting of a can ofCampbell’s soup is the classic example.

One is tempted to push the question a final step and ask whether the dissolution of cosmic order,moral order, and the hierarchic order of subject matter is reflected in the very forms of contemporaryart. Critic Russel Nye thinks that at least as far as the twentieth-century novel is concerned, theanswer is yes. “If there is a discernible trend in the form of the modern novel,” he writes, “it istoward the concept of the novel as a series of moments, rather than as a planned progression of eventsor incidents, moving toward a defined terminal end. Recent novelists tend to explore rather thanarrange or synthesize their materials; often their arrangement is random rather than sequential. In theolder tradition, a novel was a formal structure composed of actions and reactions which werefinished by the end of the story, which did have an end. The modern novel often has no such finality.”Aaron Copland characterizes the music of our young composers as “a disrelation of unrelated tones.Notes are strewn about like membra disjecta; there is an end to continuity in the old sense and an endof thematic relationships.”

When Nietzsche’s eyesight became too poor to read books, he began at last to read himself. Theact was prophetic of the century that has followed. As reality has blurred, the gaze of postmodern manhas turned increasingly upon himself.

Anthropological philosophy has replaced metaphysics. In the wake of Kierkegaard andNietzsche, attention has turned from objective reality to the individual human personality strugglingfor self-realization. “Being” remains interesting only as it relates to humanity. As its order, if it hasone, is unknown to us, being cannot be described as it is in itself; but if it is believed to bemysteriously wonderful, as some existentialists think, we should remain open to it. If it is the blind,meaningless enemy, as others suspect, we should maintain our freedom against it.

Even theology, for all its renewed theocentrism, keeps one eye steadily on man, as when theGerman theologian Rudolph Bultmann relates faith to the achievement of authentic selfhood. It is in

art, however, that the shift from outer to inner has been most evident. If the twentieth century began byabolishing the distinction between sublime and banal subject matter, it has gone on to dispense withsubject matter altogether. Although the tide may have begun to turn, the purest art is still widely felt tobe entirely abstract and free of pictorial representation. It is as if the artist had taken the scientistseriously and responded, “If what I see as nature doesn’t represent the way things really are, whyshould I credit this appearance with its former importance? Better to turn to what I am sure, of myown intuitions and the purely formal values inherent in the relations of colors, shapes, and masses.”

I have argued that the distinctive feature of the contemporary mind as evidenced by frontierthinking in science, philosophy, theology, and the arts is its acceptance of reality as unordered in anyobjective way that man’s mind can discern. This acceptance separates the Postmodern Mind fromboth the Modern Mind, which assumed that reality is objectively ordered, and the Christian mind,which assumed it to be regulated by an inscrutable but beneficent will.

It remains only to add my personal suspicion that the change from the vision of reality as orderedto unordered has brought Western man to as sharp a fork in history as he has faced. Either it ispossible for man to live indefinitely with his world out of focus or it is not. I suspect that it is not, thata will-to-order and orientation is fundamental in the human makeup. If so, the Postmodern period, likeall the intellectual epochs that preceded it, will turn out to be a transition to a still differentperspective.

Part Two of this book suggests what the contours of that new—a “new” that will turn out to beactually old—outlook might look like, but first a bit of fine print. In our fractionated intellectualworld, issues relating to the Big Picture—the widest-angled “take” we can manage on the scheme ofthings entire—have been relegated to philosophy, and the next chapter considers how it has tried tocope with (and in good part submit to) the Postmodern

2

Philosophy’s Struggle with Disorder:Metaphysics and the Post-Nietzschean Deconstruction Thereof

Historically, philosophy has assumed responsibility for articulating worldviews systematically,metaphysics being its branch that dealt with them directly. This essay picks up on the story ofmetaphysics’ collapse which the preceding chapter began. As early as midcentury, R. G. Collingwoodcould describe our times as “an age when the very possibility of metaphysics is hardly admittedwithout a struggle,” and not long afterwards Iris Murdoch was writing: “Modern philosophy isprofoundly anti-metaphysical in spirit. Its anti-metaphysical character may be summed up in thecaveat: There may be no deep structure.”

This essay protests knuckling under to our current metaphysical skepticism.

What has come to be known as “the post-Nietzschean deconstruction of metaphysics” has been oneof the important projects of our time. Its blows have been heavy; some think lethal. “ ‘God’ andmetaphysics ‘died’ in the West in approximately the same half century,” Langdon Gilkey has written.1

Has this assault on metaphysics been warranted? It is not likely that it could have enlistedassailants of the stature of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida—and in important waysbefore them Kierkegaard and Kant, to name only the representatives I shall be referring to—werethere not something right in these assailants’ polemics. The question is whether there is alsosomething wrong with them. Are the charges that have been leveled against metaphysics in the lasttwo centuries important half-truths, or are they, in aggregate, the full truth? Do they add up to caveatsor to a death warrant? Has the time come for philosophy to close its books on the metaphysicalenterprise? I intend to argue that it has not.

I. What Metaphysics Is and Does

Much depends on definitions, so let me say what I see as at issue. By metaphysics I mean aworldview that provides a sense of orientation. The word world denotes inclusiveness: the view inquestion purports to embrace everything, including regions of being that are presumed to exist withouttheir nature being known. The word view establishes an intentional analogy with eyesight: thelandscape that metaphysics opens onto and spreads before the mind’s eye is a topography, a lay of theland. If we shift our attention from the topography itself to the map of it, we see it as a “mattering

map,” a map that shows what matters. Like the maps of demographers, regions that matter much to usare so crowded with dots that they look black, while other regions taper off in diminishing shades ofgray into areas that are white, which is to say inconsequential.

These shadings tie in with the third pivotal word in our definition, namely, orientation, or asense of the lay of the land, for if we are on the move (as life always is), a sense of the lay of the landsuggests promising directions in which to move and pitfalls to avoid. The analogy with sight—worldview—also underscores metaphysics’ importance. If it is difficult to walk blindfolded in thephysical world, it is equally difficult to walk through life if “the eye of the soul” is closed.“Continued observations in clinical practice,” William Sheldon tells us, “lead almost inevitably tothe conclusion that deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for socialpower, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still more generalized and universalcraving in the human makeup. It is the craving for knowledge of the right direction—for orientation.”2

Now to be sure, this orientation not only can but does derive from sources other thanmetaphysics. Instinct supplies it for subhuman animals, and in tribal societies children acquire itunthinkingly—cum lacte, as the Romans used to say: “with the mother’s milk.” Unthinkingly heremeans “unquestioningly,” but not “mindlessly,” for as human beings have minds, these inevitably getdrawn into the act. In tribal societies the mind gets involved through myths that imprint individuals,causing them to internalize the tribe’s orientation through stories of how things got started and whatmust be done to keep them on course. So far there is no metaphysics, for to the properties ofmetaphysics I have thus far mentioned—an inclusive, or more precisely unrestricted, vision thatprovides orientation—I must add one more. Metaphysics is abstract. That it is articulated goeswithout saying.

Here arises the first criticism of the project. Granted that life needs orientation and that in Homosapiens the mind figures in effecting it, isn’t it better that the mind effect it concretely, through storiesinstead of abstractions? (Volumes of arguments exist extoling narrative over philosophy, the Bibleover theology, aesthetic mythos over logical logos, and the claims of rhetoric over the claims ofreference.)

The answer is: yes, up to a point. The vividness, immediacy, and drama of stories, all madepossible by their concreteness, give them the edge in every respect save one. When one foundationalstory collides with another that differs from it—which is to say: when one tribe or civilizationencounters another, or when within a given civilization a story arises to challenge its original,founding one, producing thereby a crisis in the body politic—stories provide no court of appeal.When biblical stories encountered those of Greece, Christian Platonism was born; when those storiescollided with Koranic ones in the Middle Ages, someone had to write the Summa Contra Gentiles.Within Christendom itself, when the Darwinian account of human origins—we are the more who havederived from the less—arose to challenge the Bible’s opposite contention, reason must again enter thefray. The deepest definition of a civilization may indeed be that it is a form of life empowered by anembracing myth, but myths of this order cannot be created consciously. In some sense of the word,myths can only be revealed, which may be what Heidegger had in mind when toward the close of hislife he said that “only a god can save us now.” This idea leaves metaphysics as what we do until theMessiah comes.

II. Pitfalls: The Deconstructionists as Warners

Every project has its pitfalls, and the deconstructionists can be credited with spotting the principalones that beset metaphysics. (I use lower-case deconstruction and its variants to refer to thedeconstruction-of-metaphysics project in general. Capitalized, the word refers to Derrida’s specificbrand thereof. As this book aims at an audience beyond that of professional philosophers, let me notethat Deconstruction is a movement of thought, growing out of the work of the contemporary Frenchphilosopher and critic Jacques Derrida, which calls into question the possibility of securelyestablishing the meaning of any human construction, including any text.)

Kierkegaard noted the complacency (through false security) that worldviews can engender. Bypurporting to disclose reality, worldviews can obscure how much of it remains a terrifying mystery—how dark the clouds of nescience that ring us round. Correlatively, in remaining stable—stayingreliably in place—worldviews obscure life’s precariousness and contingency, the ways in which wedangle by threads over seventy thousand fathoms. They also divert attention from what we do byleading us to suppose that we are saved by what we think.

Kant spotted the metaphysician’s tendency to exaggerate the capacities of objective, autonomousreason. Metaphysics includes what lies beyond physis, the Greek word for “nature”, but outside thesensible world objective reason can disclose nothing directly. The most it can do is to hazardinferences.

Nietzsche made the historicist’s point. The inclusiveness of worldviews tempts their authors tosubsume even time within them. This inverts the actual situation, for time has the metaphysicians in itsbox, not vice versa. It affects their views of everything.

This leads directly to Wittgenstein, for his “forms of life” claim for language and praxis thesuzerainty that historicism allots to time. Meaning derives from the interlocking complex of verbaland nonverbal practices that constitute society. To the extent that societies differ, the meanings theygenerate and legitimize likewise differ. How is it possible to get from the colloquialisms of actualspeech to the universals that (metaphysicians would have us believe) hold cross-culturally?

Heidegger is exercised because metaphysical preoccupation with the way things are—forHeidegger the phenomenologist this always comes down to “a way they appear to us”—blocks Beingfrom disclosing itself in alternative ways which a less assertive and willful attention might allow tosurface. Derrida continues this point and focuses it on the interpretation of texts. To posit a Signifiedto which signifiers refer, be the latter a name, an assertion, or (as in the case at hand) a metaphysicalsystem, is to close the door on alternatives. Worldviews occlude, obscuring open vision.

If the thrust of deconstructionism were simply to point to problems and dangers of the sort justsampled, there would be no quarrel. Nor should we overlook the places where deconstructionistsspeak of metaphysics in tones of guarded respect. To be sure, how they square this respect with theirnegative conclusions is not always clear, but traces of respect do obtrude, so let us take note of them.

III. Ambivalence towards Metaphysics: Deconstruction as a Lover’s Quarrel

Kant deeply believed in the noumenal realm and even sought to address it through practical reason.He simply concluded that we have no access to it either intuitively or through our categories of

understanding. We each have our own reading of Nietzsche, but I read his call for the übermensch asa cry in the dark—the only escape he could imagine from the nihilism that the collapse of metaphysicswill bring in its wake, but an escape he doubted would occur.3 For all of Heidegger’s talk about theend of metaphysics, his call to “step back out of metaphysics into the essential nature ofmetaphysics”4 seems to say explicitly that he is not against the project as such. His polemics seeminvariably to be directed against constricting versions of the enterprises; specifically, ones tailored to“technological modes of description and interpretation” wherein all noetic components—all noetic“bits,” as we might now say—are claimed to be explicitly in view; more on this later. Are wepermitted to detect in Wittgenstein’s contention that the mystical pertains not to "’how the world is,but that it is” a deep feeling, at least, for something that transcends the sensible world? DoesDerrida’s call for us to write with both hands mean that we should write constructively—metaphysically?—with our right hands while our left hands cancel what our right hands have written;this to avoid fixations?

Here, as in their caveats, the deconstructionists merit attention: their ambivalences show them tobe sensitive to problems that are inherent in their own critical program. It would be a mistake, though,and patronizing, to let fringe concessions and conciliatory asides obscure the deep iconoclasm oftheir mission—the respects in which they are all, like Nietzsche, men with hammers. Thedeconstruction-of-metaphysics movement would not have earned that name if its proponents were outsimply to recondition and repair. At heart they are demolitionists—revolutionaries rather thanreformers. Their conclusion is uncompromising, and it has two parts. Metaphysics is no longerpossible, and the motives that engender it are suspect.

Kant pronounced the first half of this dual charge, Kierkegaard the second.5 Nietzsche alignedthe two, and most deconstructionists since him have pressed both its halves. Here, though, I shallconsider them separately, and (in running our six philosophers past them) will confine myself to thesingle point that each philosopher is most commonly associated with. The diagram on the followingpage schematizes this agenda.

The Deconstructionst’s Objections to the View from Everywhere

The diagram is intended to represent the human eye.

IV. Moral Objections

I begin with the contention that even if the metaphysical world were possible or retrievable, it is, asRichard Rorty holds, a world well lost. Kierkegaard argued that the kind of truth he saw Hegelworking with, objective truth, depersonalizes, for it distances us from ourselves and from the world.(Heidegger accepts this point completely.) To get the world explicitly before us and into the full lightof consciousness, we must hold it at arm’s length, so to speak. The analogy with vision servesexistentialists perfectly, for we have to distance ourselves somewhat from objects to get them infocus, while concomitantly—here’s the rub—distancing connotes disengagement. Insofar as weobjectify our world by picturing it, it loses its power over us, for the move reverses our normalrelation to it. Whereas formerly the world ruled us, beating on unconscious regions of our lives likewaves on the shores they shape, now we rule the world, choosing which picture of it to affirm and

which to reject. This may sound like gain, which in autonomy it is, but there remains the disturbingissue of motivation. Can a life be as empowered by a world it intentionally selects as by one thatfeeds it from unknown, subterranean springs? Existentialists think not. As someone, paraphrasingthem, has quipped: “You can’t get everything into your system [read “your metaphysical system”] untilyou get everything out of your system [your total, largely unconscious and even partly biological,system].” If an understanding of the causes of our neuroses helps to relieve them, might not anunderstanding of the causes of our lives—why we believe as we do and choose as we do—relieveus, this time in the ominous sense of that phrase, of life itself?

As was earlier acknowledged, Kierkegaard is on to something here, but it applies only tooutlooks that purport to derive exclusively from reason. Versions that are anchored in an awesomesource that grounds and orients reason itself—St. Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding” is a famousformulation—are not candidates for Kierkegaard’s concern; one can hardly charge the metaphysics ofSt. Anselm or Augustine with having distanced them from life. The issue of nihilism comes in here,for Nietzsche and Heidegger see the West as heading towards a condition wherein nothing seemsbetter than anything else. If only metaphysical systems that aim for complete objectivity point towardsthis denouement, the project in its entirety need not be deterred by the prospect.

As for Derrida—and though we are reserving Heidegger for the next section, he belongs here asmuch as he did with the preceding point—his fear (as again noted in Section Two) is that Truth with acapital T marginalizes and occludes. It occludes, because if we think we have the Truth we will notbe inclined to look further; it marginalizes, because the conviction that we have the Truth shuts outthose who disagree. At best, their reports will not be taken seriously. At worst, their persons will behounded as heretics.

Here again, as moral warning the point is not only valid but important. It is also important,though, that we not let it derail us, for though we need to be reminded of it repeatedly, it hardlydecommissions the metaphysical enterprise. In human behavior—in relationships between people—the word discrimination indicates a moral flaw, but with ideas the case is different. No idea is worthits salt if it doesn’t discriminate, sifting truth from error, or at least relevance from irrelevance. In thisrespect, every idea that asks to be taken seriously discriminates—yes, discriminates against:marginalizes is the preferred Derridaian word—its contrary, implying the irrelevance (if notinvalidity) of the latter for purposes at hand. (For a generation, deconstructionist arguments haveseverely marginalized metaphysics and metaphysicians.) As for occluding—the charge that byfocusing on Truth, logocentricism discourages consideration of potentially rewarding alternatives andsupplements—this turns out to be the same as the charge of marginalizing, for to say anything divertsattention from (and thereby marginalizes) what is not being said. A further point crowds in here. Howare we to decide where to turn our attention if we have no mattering map that grades regions inimportance? Presumably the appearances we might experience in certain regions are so trivial that,given life’s brevity, they scarcely warrant shepherding.

V. Epistemic Objections

Having used Kierkegaard and Derrida to introduce moral misgivings about the metaphysicalenterprise, I turn now to epistemological misgivings. Primarily deriving, as they do, from the

remaining four of our six philosophers, the misgivings issue from the domains those philosophers areassociated with: critical philosophy, historicism, phenomenology, and linguistic philosophy. Togetherthey all but box the recent philosophical compass:

Kant for critical philosophyThe mind doesn’t mirror the order of nature; it constitutes that order. We see nature from the vantagepoint of, and as it conforms to, the structure of human reason. So argues the single most influentialwork in modern philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. And because the categories of humanunderstanding cope only with impressions that come to us from the world of nature, to try to deploythem elsewhere is like trying to cut the wind with a knife. There is no possibility of direct knowledgeof suprasensible realities, or, for that matter, of nature as constituted of things-in-themselves. All wecan directly know are phenomena: things as they present themselves to us; things as they appear to us,not things as they are. The world in its own right, the noumenal world, can only be inferred.

I cite the Critique that argues this epistemic posture as the most influential work in modernphilosophy, and nothing so supports that judgment as Kant’s lingering hold on the Modern Mind,despite the fact that there are no card-carrying Kantians anymore! There is an anomaly here. Why dowe continue to accept Kant’s conclusions when for some time now we have dismissed his arguments?This is partly because the cross-cultural findings, though they have shown his “universal” categoriesof reason not to be such, have confirmed his underlying insight that the mind is constructive; itsworkings are variegated, but it is indeed agent, not patient only. This aspect of Kant’s heritage is animportant legacy, a continuing gain. Its shadow side, however, is our continued acceptance of Kant’slogically separate assumption that the mind’s creativity (in affecting our knowledge of the naturalworld) is flanked by imbecility when it comes to understanding anything else. “With our lack ofinsight into supersensible objects…the minimum of knowledge must [there] suffice,” Kant decreed.6We can appreciate why he did so. Alarmed by his associates’ fascination with Swedenborg’s “eye-witness” reports that heaven’s antechambers resemble Stockholm in such detail that departed spiritshave difficulty appreciating that they have died, Kant’s rationalism recoiled in horror and laid downthe law. This far may belief about the unseen world reasonably proceed, but no farther! To repeat: wecan appreciate why Kant drew the line where he did, but must we, two hundred years later, be boundby that line against the combined evidences of Plato’s “eye of the soul,” the Vedantic buddhi, and theintellectus of the Middle Ages? Modesty has its place, but James Cutsinger has pointed out that weare not more modest than our precursors; we hang our arrogance in different quarters. Whereas ourforebears strike us as arrogant in the amount they thought they knew, we are oppositely arrogant.“Virtually every contemporary [philosophical and] theological methodology takes as its starting-pointhow well we know how little we know.” In this respect “fidelity to Kant [remains] the touchstone ofour period.”7 Sociologists of knowledge would have no difficulty explaining this, but are there anyreasons why we should keep our minds in this abject crouch?

Nietzsche for historicismNietzsche refuses to do our work for us; we have to be almost as shrewd as he was to impose on hiscorpus the reading that does most justice to his Rorschach blot. I have already tipped my hand.Agreeing with everyone about his enormous and continuing influence, I am also impressed by theclarity and alacrity with which he saw: first, that the whole realm of the supersensible and the

transcendent has ceased to command Western credence; and second, how much that loss entails.These are the death-of-God and nihilism themes, respectively. The rest is a very mixed bag, fromwhich I shall extract only the single item that bears most on our subject, namely, Nietzsche’shistoricism.

History was Nietzsche’s special field of study, and he never outgrew it. Accepting the“Copernican revolution” of Kant’s first Critique, he turned the discussion away from the innatecontributions the human mind brings to its knowing and towards the way it is conditioned by itshistorical milieu. “What separates us from Kant,’’ he tells us in Human, All Too Human, “is that webelieve that becoming is the rule even in the spiritual things. We are historians from top to bottom…[Philosophers] all to a man think unhistorically, as is the age old custom with philosophers.”

What are we to think of this? That our times condition us is not in question; the question iswhether the differences that successive periods introduce preempt the entire picture, thereby shuttingout continuities. If the answer is no, historicism climbs down from its dogmatic perch and becomes aresearch program as we go to work sifting similarities and differences in each particular case. If, onthe other hand, we preclude continuities by fiat, this dogmatic historicism self-destructs by its ownweight; for the claim that historical horizons do not overlap at all is an ahistorical claim that purportsto cover all historical horizons. Historicism also raises the question of whether our historicityconditions or determines us, and here too Nietzsche waffles. In his Untimely Meditations he iscontent to say that “since we are the outcomes of earlier generations…it is not possible wholly to freeoneself from this chain” (emphasis mine). But in The Twilight of Idols he calls the notion of freedomitself into question. “In the beginning there is that great calamity of error that the will is somethingwhich is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word” (3:5). It is one of the“phantoms and will-o’-the-wisps” that inhabit the imaginary “inner world” (6:3), a phantom that was“invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wanted to impute guilt”(6:7).

Heidegger for phenomenologyHusserl took the planks that Nietzsche pried up from Kant’s boat and nailed them back together in away that looked more like the original hulk. The task of philosophy is to understand the mind’s apriori structures and workings. As Husserl’s student, Heidegger began in this way, but sensingsubjectivism and even solipsism waiting in the wings,8 he shifted his weight to the other side ofidealism’s mind/world divide. Daseins is “being-in-the-world.” There is no need either to assume orto bracket the world, for there is no daseins without the world. Despite this radical shift, however,Heidegger remained a phenomenologist in retaining Husserl’s epoche: he simply deployed itdifferently. Whereas Husserl excluded from consideration what might exist antecedent to the shapinginfluences of the human mind,9 Heidegger excludes what might exist outside the shaping influences ofhistorical epochs—influences that empower human knowledge, shape its character, and prescribe itslimits. As historical horizons cannot be breached, only what appears within them—phenomena—canbe countenanced. In the crucial case for metaphysics, since Being never presents itself within ahorizon as a phenomenon, it is a procedural mistake to reify it and regard it as an agent that somehowproduces or gives rise to phenomena. We must confine ourselves to the disclosures themselves as theyappear in clearings that daseins permit. Phenomenology’s principle of principles, “to the thingsthemselves,” remains intact.

Because “the end of metaphysics” was central to Heidegger’s entire project, I shall say moreabout him than I have about my other philosophers. As a symptom spotter, alerting us to the West’sslope towards nihilism, calculative thought, and the manipulative arrangements its scientistic,technological social order impose on life, Heidegger is unsurpassed; he had a watchman’s eye fordanger signals. Equally impressive is the life-stance he advocates: a stance of openness, trustfulness,gratitude, and caring concern for the gifts of Being. So impressive are these virtues that I keepwondering if I am overlooking something in adding what I feel must be added; namely, that asdiagnostician, in identifying the causes of the symptoms he so perceptively detects, Heidegger isunreliable.

I leave aside his controversial treatment of Plato. Friedlander and Gadamer called Heidegger onthis in his own lifetime,10 and I myself keep wondering why he: (a) typically cites the early rather thanthe later, more mature, Plato; and (b) neglects the overarching dramatic structure of the Dialogues,which conditions the meaning of their specific passages. Once and noncommitally, he mentions theSeventh Epistle which places Plato’s entire project in a significantly different light. Further, (c) Iwonder if Aristotle would have broken with his mentor if Plato had been altogether the apodictic“metaphysician” (in Heidegger’s pejorative sense of that word) that Heidegger makes him out to be?These points trouble me, but I leave them to better Plato scholars than I11 in order to proceed to sixpoints that loom larger:

1. Do we need to look earlier than the advent of modern science for the causes of our modernailments that Heidegger so penetratingly perceives? In one of his illuminating articles on Heidegger,Hubert Dreyfus writes: “Science is our religion in the very important sense that we think science tellsus what reality is.” And what does it tell us? Dreyfus answers: reality “is meaningless physicalreality.”12

2. We do need to dig back further in our history, Heidegger’s followers will answer, for we needto see that metaphysics prepared the way for science. That there is some connection between the twois probably the case—a civilization’s worldview probably affects everything within it in some way.What has not been shown is that there is a tight, linear connection between metaphysics and modernscience—Heidegger’s claim that his “step back out of metaphysics…is the step out of technology andtechnological description and interpretation.”13 Shankara and Nagarjuna were metaphysicians or theword has no meaning, but modern science didn’t issue from their labors.

3. There is one piece of historical evidence which single-handedly, alone and by itself it seemsto me, demolishes Heidegger’s charge that metaphysics engenders nihilism. Nihilism is sameness, thevanishing of significant differences between alternatives, and Heidegger argued that it began to rearits head with Plato and has kept pace thereafter with the advance of metaphysics. But until modernscience dealt metaphysics what may yet prove to be a mortal blow—the patient remains in intensivecare—metaphysics did not blur differences in the least. If anything, it pushed them to extremes, untilat the peak of the Middle Ages it confronted Western man with the most momentous difference themind can conceive: eternal salvation versus eternal damnation. It was not metaphysics as such but aspecific version thereof, the scientistic version, that collapsed the infinite distance between heavenand hell by dismissing their referents.

4. All of the foregoing points come down, in the end, to whether Heidegger’s definition ofmetaphysics does justice to the enterprise, which is why I gave my opening section to indicating howI think the enterprise should be conceived. Heidegger presents metaphysics as working exclusivelywith objective, autonomous reason. “Reason” here is the mind working logically with clear anddistinct ideas. To prefix it with the word objective is to claim for such reason rights over the humanmind per se; people whose minds are normal and informed must, on pain of forfeiting theirrationality, bow to its claims. Autonomous (in all this) means that to deliver its binding judgments,reason has no need of promptings from any extra-rational source. If Heidegger is right and this is whatmetaphysics is—objective, autonomous reason purporting to produce a definitive printout of the waythings finally are—the sooner its brittle pretentions are punctured, the better.

To be sure, this is what metaphysics looks like if we squint primarily at its modern expressions,severed by choice not only from religion but from tradition generally. These versions are alsodisdainful (if even cognizant) of the great Asian systems which regularly open onto the ineffable anddraw their profundities there-from—Nirguna Brahman, Sunyata, and the Tao that cannot be spoken.But the Enlightenment Project is not the sum of metaphysics, or even its signature. Because Heideggerwrites as if in signature it were, his criticisms are usually well taken; they simply do not apply—not(I would argue) to metaphysics’ most mature and impressive models. For Heidegger simply defines,in a mode that approaches pure legislation, metaphysics as the exercise that “thinks about beings asbeings”;14 since the pre-Socratics it has been forgetful of the Being from which they issue. Deflatedthus by definition—severed from its higher reaches and in this sense decapitated, it is not too much tosay—metaphysics, or rather in a very real sense its corpse, becomes for Heidegger easy prey.

The living species is different. Until modern science placed it on the defensive and skewed itscourse, metaphysics was seldom unaware of Being’s ineffable source. Nor did its reason presume tofunction autonomously, as we are reminded by the medieval characterizations of philosophy as thehandmaiden of theology. In Christian philosophy it was fed by theology, which was based on stories,which in turn derived from events, while in Greece it drew on intuitive discernments (Plato’s “eye ofthe soul”) and a legacy of myths that motored reason powerfully and directed it aright. It is of coursethe apophatic or mystical tradition, with its distinction between ratio and intellectus, that recognizesthe dependent character of reason most explicitly. Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Dionysus, andAugustine; medieval philosophy where it inclines towards Plato rather than Aristotle (though themysticism in Aquinas and even Aristotle is coming to be reappreciated); and Gregory of Palamos andMeister Eckhart—these I see as Western instances of metaphysics in a mode that the deconstruction ofmetaphysics movement leaves unscathed.

5. Is Heidegger historian only, purporting to do no more than interpret the odyssey of Westernphilosophy? Or does he slant his interpretation from a metaphysical stance of his own—a “view fromeverywhere” which, though unacknowledged, is metaphysical by Heidegger’s own definition ofmetaphysics as that which “thinks…what is indifferently valid everywhere”? I see him doing thelatter. Acknowledged or not, did he not in fact believe that, not just in our Western clearing butwherever there are human beings, unconcealing (aletheia) occurs through “clearings in the forestdarkness” that human linguistic, social, and cultural practices open up and provide? Thisunconcealing is, for Heidegger, of Being, a term which (in its ineffability, unconditionedness, andpresumed infinitude) I am unable to distinguish from Sunyata, Nirguna Brahman, the Beyond-Being of

Iambicus, or even the Plotinian One, save in two respects. Heidegger’s Being is not an agent or cause,and it cannot be presumed to be good. By my lights both these lacks are defects,15 but the issue here isnot the worth of Heidegger’s metaphysics or its affinity with positions to which it seems cognate inways. Rather, it is whether his position should be seen as metaphysical in its own right. It appears tome that it should be.

6. Because metaphysics for Heidegger is the heart of philosophy, he sees the end of one as theend of the other. Within his historicist framework this makes sense in a certain way, for it is difficultto see where the trajectory of modern philosophy might yet lead. But that simply reraises theproblematics of untempered historicism.

Confining himself to the West, and defining metaphysics (the heart of philosophy, remember)idiosyncratically, Heidegger lays philosophy to rest by sundering body from soul. His own positionemerged from his life-long wrestle with philosophy, but he emerged from that aganon bent onpatricide. For if (as he concludes) the soul of philosophy is Being and its body reason, with thepassing of the centuries the two factor out and part company. Displaying with increasing clarity itstelos towards calculative, manipulative mentation, reason splays out into the positive sciences, whileBeing, having delivered reason to its destined home, checks in with the poets. “This is the point inHeidegger’s philosophy to which I take exception,” writes one of its staunchest admirers, JohnCaputo:

Heidegger rejects the possibility of philosophy as a tertium quid, that is, as a thinking which is neither will-less non-representational “meditation” (Besinnung) nor a calculative, mathematical science.…That leaves us with a whole host ofproblems for which I do not see that there would be, in Heidegger’s view, any place to turn in order to find a solution. Ibelieve that there is a whole network of difficulties which are not merely technical problems and with which the methods ofthe technological sciences are simply unsuited to deal. Nor are they questions from which we can expect an answer from the(poets).16

Wittgenstein for linguistic philosophyThe philosophical cold war of the middle third of this past century—between continentalexistentialism and phenomenology east of the English Channel, and Anglo-American analytic andlinguistic philosophy to its west—has ended, thanks to a concept that has drawn the antagoniststogether. It is the concept of human beings as social functionaries. For Heidegger’s socio-historicalhorizons in the preceding section, we need only substitute Wittgenstein’s “forms of life,” and we havethe same basic epistemology, one that sees knowing as socially generated and restricted to itsgenerating crucible.17 Heidegger favors thinking that is meditative while Wittgenstein inclines towardthought that is instrumental—rationality is practical reason for him—but the sources and ceilings ofknowing are the same in both cases. “It makes [no] sense to talk about getting outside all socialschema of concepts, beliefs and ideals of truth [to see them] as so many views of how things ‘really’are,” says Henry Ruf, speaking for Wittgenstein in the paper cited in the preceding footnote. If SaulKripke is correct,18 Wittgenstein held that even mathematical truth is socially conjured, for all truth is“intra-systematic”; as Richard Rorty puts the point jauntily, it is “what our peers will let us get awaywith saying.”19 Cross-cultural consensus in arithmetic doesn’t derive from the compelling power ofconcepts and reason. It is the other way around. Social consensus is what makes concepts compel,while producing those concepts in the first place.

What is a metaphysician to think of this? That thought—all thought—is socially mediatedpresents no problem. The question is: Where do the worlds that are socially mediated (a) differincommensurably, (b) overlap, thanks to cross-cultural correspondences in human nature and thephysical world, and (c) differ in ways that can be hermeneutically reconciled. Piaget reports that inthe course of human development, individuals normally reach a stage of “decentration” wherein theycan adopt increasingly universal standpoints, giving up particular egocentric or sociocentric ways ofunderstanding and acting to move towards the “universal human community.” Have Wittgenstein andHeidegger discovered any uncircumventable barriers beyond which this movement cannot proceed?20

Wittgenstein was so burned by his youthful effort to produce specifications for a universal“ideal” language that, when he realized that such a language would be unable to register the idiomsand other idiosyncrasies of disparate communities, he went to the opposite extreme, arguing thatlanguage is capable of virtually nothing but colloquialisms. Ernest Gellner pinpoints the consequence:

Language was, and [for Wittgenstein] would only be, a set of multi-purpose customs enmeshed in an inevitably idiosyncratic‘form of life’—cultures. Gemeinschaft thereby…became the only possible form of society, and the possibility of anythingelse was excluded. The closed community carried meanings, and the meanings sustained it. Meaning was only possible incommunity, and it alone made community possible.…Transcendence of social bounds, by private and independent thought,was declared impossible.21

VI. Rejoinder

Differences among these four epistemologies should not obscure from us their collective drift, whichis from the one to the many, from the absolute to the relative, from objectivity to subjectivity, fromrealism to idealism-in-Kant and pragmatism-elsewhere, and from correspondence andrepresentational thinking to instrumental, heuristic thinking as this alternates with aestheticimmediacy. This characterization will be resisted, and, stated thus baldly, it can be faulted in details.But no amount of squirming can relieve the ultimate disjunctions in the decisions that are being made.To take just the realism/pragmatism option, Timothy Jackson is quite right in saying that “thecompeting intuitions behind the realism-pragmatism debates [are] entirely basic and mutuallyexclusive.…Realism and pragmatism are contradictories, not contraries; there is no third alternative,[for] once all theory-independent reality is denied, some form of pragmatism [is] inevitable.”22

Jackson is right, too, in adding that “waiting at the end of this road is a fideism in which theology [andphilosophy are] indeed, ‘just talk’.”

What about the objective-subjective disjunction—Kant with his human subjectivity, Nietzschewith his historical subjectivity, and Heidegger and Wittgenstein with their self-enclosed, cultural-linguistic, social subjectivities? We can come straight to the point and ask if subjectivity has anymeaning apart from objectivity. If not, is not our ability to understand the very concept “subjectivity”evidence of our mind’s objective capacity? (A dog’s knowing is subjective, the proof being that itdoesn’t know that it is such.) What the deconstructionists seem to overlook is that objectivity, in someform of adequation to the given, is the mind’s raison d’etre, its distinctive talent.23

The trouble is that, with the rise of modern science, the given has for all practical purposes beenreduced to empirical reality and objectivity to knowledge thereof. Human life cannot be reduced tothis dimension, and the deconstructionists, standard-bearers in part for Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche’s

existentialism, see that clearly. Fighting desperately for the rights of the human, they have selected adifferent “object” for thought, the human subject, and sought to fashion a different kind of truth to dealwith it. Kierkegaard went so far as to call it “truth as subjectivity.” In protesting the encroachment ofscientific objectivity on humanity’s understanding of itself, the deconstructionists are right. Wherethey go wrong is in faulting the second word in the phrase “scientific objectivity” rather than the first;they mistakenly suppose that knowledge suffers when we require it to be objective, whereas in fact itsuffers only if we require that, to be knowledge in the full sense of the word, it must be objective bythe canons of science, including proof. That small slip opened the sluice-gates to subjectivism and itsassociate, relativism, and the “human sciences” have been floundering in their tide ever since.24

Historicism and hermeneutics, deconstruction and the extolling of narrative truth over itsmetaphysical counterpart—all, at root, are ways of trying to keep one’s nose above water, tryingcognitively to breathe, while sloshing around in the subjectivist bog. We know that solipsism,however logically invincible its die-hard version may seem, is wrong. What we do not see, havingbeen thrown off balance by the power of science which is at the same time stupendous and radicallylimited, is that subjectivism and relativism are halfway houses down solipsism’s slope. They aresocial or collective solipsisms, we might say; not quite as absurd as solipsism’s strict, individualisticversion, but in the end no more workable or true.

As for the ceilings to which deconstructionist epistemologies all (in their various ways) subjecthuman knowing, I have room here for no more than a single rhetorical question: are many things morefutile than trying to use the mind to limit the mind? Many modes of mental functioning are indeedlimited, but to indicate these the mind must shift to a different register, proving thereby the existenceof that register. In India, the most developed distinction is between manas and buddhi; in the West,between ratio and intellectus. Heidegger’s alethia and Wittgenstein’s “showing” gesture towardsthese noetic distinctions, but inadequately, being hobbled by assumptions that rule out importantpossibilities.

VII. The View from Everywhere

Bouncing off from Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere which holds that, though we can thinkabout the world as it transcends our own interests and experience, we cannot really know anythingabout it, this essay urges a return to more hopeful expectations.

True, a “view from everywhere” should be read as “everywhere human,” for there is no reasonto think that our view is much like a caterpillar’s—or God’s, though it is claimed that (in a wayanalogous to the way relativity theory leaves Newtonian mechanics intact) God sees that things areobjectively positioned towards us in the way we see them. As finite selves, we are set amidst otherobjects and selves whose existence does not depend on us. Some of those objects and selvesconspired to bring us into existence; hence metaphysical realism.25 A correspondence theory of truth,not a pragmatic one, is both natural and required toward those independent-of-us objects. Pragmatismcan be folded into the correspondence theory as useful in places, but it cannot replace that theory.(Tell a man who is falling in love that “She loves me” means no more than “Given the evidence, stepsthat will deepen our relationship are appropriate”—not that “She feels towards me the way I feeltowards her”—and he is likely to hit you.) In some sense correspondence calls for representation, so

it is unfortunate if Foucault is right in saying that “everywhere representational thinking is at anend.”26 Representational thinking need not be naive, though. In subtle gradations it can range all theway from almost picture postcard depictions of tables and chairs to the claims of mathematicians thatthey “see” logical objects and their relationships. A sand dune would not have to think of the wind asgranular to be right in representing it as a force that exists apart from dunes and impacts them to shapetheir contours.

It may be the case that at some ultimate level, duality and correspondence do disappear asknowing phases into direct apprehension; if it is mysticism, immanent or transcendent, that thedeconstructionists have in mind, it would help if they said so more explicitly. It is not my presentobject, though, to press the question of what a fitting metaphysics for our time might be; that is theconcern of the next essay. Believing with Jacques Maritain that “a loss or weakening of themetaphysical spirit is an incalculable damage for the general order of intelligence and human affairs,”I have sought here only to argue for the continued importance of the metaphysical quest.

Two rhetorical questions can round off my case.First. In reviewing favorably Jean-Luc Marion’s Dieu sans l’Etre (God without Being), yet

another in the seemingly endless torrent of books that catalogue the sins of metaphysics, Harvey Coxnevertheless concedes that “eventually, of course, all these antimetaphysical critics will have to facethe contention that no one ever really escapes metaphysics, that its derogators end up hiding it,obscuring it, or doing it badly.”27 To which it seems sensible to ask: if eventually, why not now?

That seems obvious, but this second question I do not find as frequently raised. Do thedeconstructionists accurately assess what our times require? Within the freedom-form polaritiesbetween which life has no choice but to shuttle, this century’s deconstructionists side invariably withfreedom. “Unmasking” is the word the following characterization of the “postmodern movement” usesfor this predilection.

It is an antinomian movement that assumes a vast unmaking in the Western mind.…I say ‘unmaking’ though other terms arenow de rigeur deconstruction, decentering, disappearance, dissemination, demystification, discontinuity, difference,dispersion, etc. Such terms…express an epistemological obsession with fragments or fractures, and a correspondingideological commitment to minorities in politics, sex and language. To think well, to feel well, to act well, to read well,according to the episteme of unmaking, is to refuse the tyranny of wholes; totalization in any human endeavor is potentiallytotalitarian.28

Pointing to the “deep suspicion, hostility and ridicule of any aspiration to unity, reconciliation,harmony, totality, the whole, the one” in this movement, Richard Bernstein, in his 1988 presidentialaddress to the Metaphysical Society of America, goes on to note also its reason: a “widespread biasthat these signifiers mask repression and violence; that there is an inevitable slippage from totality tototalitarianism and terror.”29

What is needed, Bernstein argues, is a questioning of this bias, an inquiry into whether theslippage is inevitable or, alternatively, a danger to be guarded against. “When we are told that ‘tothink well, to feel well, to act well, to read well’ is to refuse ‘the tyranny of wholes,’…what issecreted is an ideal of what constitutes the good life.…We need to question this ideal of living welland why it should be affirmed.”30

Part Two

A CLEARING

Part One of this book traced the intellectual odyssey that has led to the West s current despairover the possibility of overviews—or even their desirability, some think—and was historical. Itwas also abstract in that it focused on the fate of the metaphysical enterprise as such.

Part Two turns a corner on both those counts. Putting history aside it becomes constructive.And it becomes concrete, for we get further (I believe) if instead of indefinitely arguing the fate ofworldviews abstractly, we put forward the best one we know and see how it fares.

This next essay—the only one that was written expressly for this book in its first edition—makes that move. If the outlook it introduces appears to have more in common with ones thatpredated the rise of modern science, I ask the reader not to judge that fact prematurely. What mayat first glance seem conservative can in fact be “radically conservative” if it cuts back on the treetrunk to a point below where its limbs begin to branch, that being the point where sap flowsstrongest.

In the mnemonic device we use for remembering how to reset our clocks in relation toDaylight Saving Time, Part Two “falls back” in order to “spring forward.”

3

The Stable Backdrop: Perennial Philosophy, Primordial Tradition

An indication of how the outlook to be described broke over me may help to highlight some of itsfeatures, so I shall use this way of moving into it.

Early resonance to the writings of Gerald Heard had led me to his friend Aldous Huxley and themosaic of mysticism the latter had put together under the title The Perennial Philosophy. In hisintroduction to that book, Huxley notes that though it was Leibniz who coined the phrase philosophiaperennis, the thing itself—“the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world ofthings and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or evenidentical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanentand transcendent Ground of all being—is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the PerennialPhilosophy,” he continues,

may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms ithas a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequenttheologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme hasbeen treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia andEurope.1

And in all the world’s contorting myths, adds Joseph Campbell. Wherever we turn, what weinvariably find is “the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story” that sets in narrative formthe philosophy Huxley just described.

For twenty-five years I had known of this position and even sensed theoretically that it pointedin the right direction, but it took a sequence of concrete events to bring me face to face with it,whereupon it quickly took over. I had known that certain contemporary thinkers such as AnandaCoomaraswamy and Réne Guénon stood in direct line with the writers Huxley had anthologized, but itwas Frithjof Schuon’s books that caused the familiar to jump to my attention as if I were seeing it withnew eyes. I tell the story in my introduction to the revised edition of Schuon’s Transcendent Unity ofReligions, but retell it here for purposes at hand.

It was the autumn of 1969, and I was embarking on an academic year around the world. Of thedecisions as to what to include in my forty-four-pound luggage limit, the final one concerned a bookthat had just crossed my desk: In the Tracks of Buddhism by Frithjof Schuon. I barely recognized hisname, but the book’s middle section, entitled “Buddhism’s Ally in Japan: Shinto or the Way of theGods,” caught my eye. Two weeks later, at our first stop, Japan, I would have to be lecturing on

Shinto and I had little feel for its outlook. I badly needed an entrée, so I wedged the book into mybulging flight bag.

It proved to be the best decision of the year. Before the sacred shrine at Ise, symbolic center ofthe nation of Japan, under its giant cryptomeria and at low tables in its resthouse for pilgrims, the Wayof the Gods opened before me. Ise’s atmosphere itself could not be credited with the unveiling, butonly if I add that it was Schuon’s insights that enabled me to sense within that atmosphere—itsdignity, beauty, and repose—an intellective depth. I came to see how ancestors could appear lessfallen than their descendants and thereby serve, when revered, as doorways to transcendence. I sawhow virgin nature—especially in its grand phenomena: sun, wind, moon, thunder, lightning, and thesky and earth that are their containers—could be venerated as the most transparent symbols of thedivine. Above all, I saw how Shinto, indigenous host for “the Japanese miracle,” could be seen as themost intact instance of an archaic hyperborean shamanism that swept from Siberia across the BeringStraits to the Native Americans.

Two months later, in India, the same thing happened. Perusing a bookstore in Madras, my eye fellon a study of the Vedanta entitled Language of the Self, again by Frithjof Schuon. This time I didn’thesitate. My remaining weeks in India were spent with that book under my arm, and I was happy. Adecade’s tutelage under a swami of the Ramakrishna Order had familiarized me with the basicVedantic outlook, but Schuon took off from there as if from base camp, while showing at each step,through a stunning series of cross references, how the Vedantic profundities were Indie variations onthemes that are universal because grounded in man’s inherent nature as related to his Source.

Would one believe a third installment? In Iran, its leading Islamicist pointed me to Schuon’sUnderstanding Islam as “the best work in English on the meaning of Islam and why Muslims believein it.” I had been to East Asia, South Asia, and West Asia, and in each the same personage hadsurfaced to guide and illumine. The point, though, is not the person or the particular books thatcrossed my path but rather the position they articulated.

The feature of that position that grasped me was the way it joined universality to final truth. Ofthese two, truth is the more important, but the position’s insistence that no human collectivity has beenwithout it (an insistence so strong that the words primordial and perennial are built into its veryname, which I adopt for the title of this chapter) made me listen intently to what was being said, for Iwas caught up in the cross-cultural issue. As missionaries to China, my parents and grandparents hadgiven their lives to taking truth to those who lacked it, whereas my cross-cultural eyes hadaccommodated better to the truths of others that were relevant to myself as well.2 How much myupbringing in another culture set the stage I do not know, but what was clear was that, though I haddelighted in cultural differences, I had not been able to absolutize them. Training under swamis, Zenmasters, and Sufi shaikhs; encountering Tiwis and Aruntas in the Australian bush; sitting in totalharmony with Thomas Merton, the Dalai Lama, and remarkable Native American chiefs on theOnondaga and Winnebago reservations, I had felt the same still presence.

What I did not know was how to articulate that presence, and the perennial philosophy showedme the way. Because it speaks a “spiritual esperanto,” as it were, its claimed universality meritsanother two paragraphs.

I think we can now see that the radical existentialist claim that man has no nature (“existenceprecedes essence”) was an exaggeration to make a point; the givens in human existence cannot bediscounted this easily. By definition we all partake of these givens—we are all more human than

otherwise—and as intelligence is one of them, it stands to reason that in pondering ourcommonalities, thoughtful persons everywhere would have gravitated toward similar conclusions. Ifwe approach the point by way of revelation instead of human discovery, the result is the same. ThatGod, while desiring the well-being of his/her/its children, should have left the vast majority of them(including the most gifted) to stagnate for thousands of years, practically without hope in the darknessof mortal ignorance, until he/she/it chose to disclose his/her/its truth to a rivulet of humanityconcentrated in a tiny locale, this “scandal of particularity” (if I have rightly stated its essence) is toomonstrous to abide. “To suppose that God could act in such a manner flagrantly contradicts [his]nature, the essence of which is Goodness and Mercy. This nature, as theology is far from beingunaware, can be ‘terrible’ but not monstrous.”3 Saint Augustine’s doctrine of “Wisdom uncreate, thesame now as it ever was and ever will be,” is more generous and becoming, as is his conclusion thatthis Wisdom came to be called Christianity only after the coming of Christ. According to an esotericexegesis of Genesis 11:1, the primordial or unanimous tradition goes back to the single spirituallanguage which, with the Tower of Babel, splintered into multiple but parallel dialects.

The obvious problem the claim of unanimity must face is the differences that traditions alsodisplay. Some thinkers are so occupied with these differences that they dismiss claims ofcommonality as simply sloppy thinking, yet identity within difference is as common an experience aslife affords. Green is not blue, yet both are light. A gold watch is not a gold ring, but both are gold.Women are not men, but both are human. Everything turns on which foot one comes down on. And asthat cannot be decided by logic, we need to bring in content to determine which “foot” deserves to beemphasized. That the truth in question has been ubiquitous—“the living God…in…all nations…leftnot himself without witness” (Acts 14:15-17)—is in its favor, but it is not that which makes it eitherimportant or true.

Aldous Huxley characterizes the perennial philosophy as

the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology thatfinds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in theknowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.4

As I cannot imagine a better brief summation, I shall let my own exposition take the form of acommentary on these three basic themes.

I. Metaphysics

“The Metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives andminds”

The perennial philosophy is emphatically ontological, which is to say that its overriding concern iswith being (on in Greek). Heidegger says that the West has forgotten the question of being, and on thewhole he is right. The collapse of metaphysics which Part One of this book describes is the clearestsign of this forgetting, along with the concomitant rise to preeminence of topics which, thoughimportant, should rightfully remain ancillary: epistemology, language, and questions of method. “Aloss or weakening of the metaphysical spirit is an incalculable damage for the general order of

intelligence and human affairs,“ I have already quoted Jacques Maritain as writing,5 and so it is. Asour fate is totally dependent on the matrix that produced and sustains us, interest in its nature is theholiest interest that can visit us.

A key feature of that nature, according to the perennial philosophy, is its hierarchical character.6

In outlining his own notion of the universe as a “holarchy,” a hierarchy of holons or self-maintainingentities that are parts of larger wholes, Arthur Koestler admits that “hierarchy is an ugly word.Loaded with ecclesiastical and military associations, [it] conveys to some people a wrongimpression of a rigid or authoritarian structure.” But misunderstandings and possible abuses, he goeson to say, should not blind us to the fact that “all complex structures and processes of relatively stablecharacter display hierarchic organization, and this applies regardless whether we are consideringinanimate systems, living organisms, social organizations, or patterns of behavior.”7 “The almostuniversal applicability of the hierarchic model” that Koestler points to (p. 291) is obvious in theempirical world,8 but the metaphysical point is that it is not likely that it would figure so prominentlythere if it were not embedded in the structure of reality itself.

The conception of the universe as…ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents…through “everypossible” grade up to the ens perfectissimum…has, in one form or another, been the dominant official philosophy of thelarger part of civilized mankind through most of its history.9

The different grades that are mentioned in this quotation are analogous to the levels of size ininanimate matter (as encountered in quantum mechanics, chemistry, daily life, and astronomy) and thedegrees of complexity in organic life (plant, animal, and human). In each domain or kingdom, we finddistinctive properties and laws that hold for its population but not for others; they define the region inquestion and distinguish it from its neighbors. In philosophy, categories are used to sort out classes ofthings that need to be distinguished, and the phrase “category mistake” has caught on to signal theconfusion that results when their differences are neglected. The distinctive claim of the perennialphilosophy, as the quotation from Lovejoy brings out, is that the categories of existents—the classesof kinds of things that exist—are hierarchically ordered. Reality is tiered; being and value increase asthe levels ascend. Ascent is used here figuratively, of course. No literal up, or spatial move of anykind, is involved.

We must attend carefully here, for this is the step in the argument which, though it wascommonplace to the point of being universal in the past, is the most difficult for modernconsciousness to grasp. What can it mean to say that X has more being than Y; or in ordinary parlance,that it is more real?

Plato’s allegory of the cave is the classic effort to tell us. The shadows its chained prisoners seeare certainly real in that they exist in some sense and to some degree, but the objects that cast thoseshadows are more substantial and, in this sense, embody more existence. In possessing threedimensions rather than two, in outlasting their shadows and manifesting more independence generally,three-dimensional objects possess in greater abundance properties that things must possess to someextent if they are to exist at all. When one of the prisoners manages to escape from Plato’s cave, theprivative character of shadows becomes self-evident, for shadows are nothing but the relativeabsence of light—the light that can then be directly seen.

To ring a change on Plato’s allegory: I enter a room and see my wife. No, it turns out not to be

her; it is her reflection in a wall-size mirror. The reflection exists, but it is certainly not my wife. Andit is manifestly less than my wife, which would become transparently evident if I tried to embrace herreflection. If it be objected that the reflection is less real as wife but not as reflection, the answer isthat it is the former that is at issue. That her reflection falls short of her full selfhood is (we are askedto think) analogous to the ways some beings fall short of others. The difficult part, of course, is toimagine things that are more real than the three-dimensional objects that stand before us in cleardaylight. Perhaps it will help if, staying with the example of my wife, we try to imagine a perceptionthat could encompass her entire history—each moment exactly as she lived it but collapsed in a waythat enabled me to take them all in at once. If in some magical way the dimension of time were thusadded to the three that are now evident, the wife I now see would by comparison seem abstract in theway her two-dimensional reflection is abstract now. To my newly endowed eyes, her three-dimensional self would be only the surface of her complete, longitudinal self that the added timedimension placed before me like a four-dimensional “block.”

The point of fanciful moves like these is to try to breathe life into the possibility that we are notthe highest octave in being’s register. There are things that exceed us and the things our senses reportin the way objects exceed shadows and wives their mirror images. Obviously we are surrounded byobjects that exceed us in certain respects—mountains outlast us in duration and lightning packs morepower—but the claim of the great chain of being, which can be taken as the perennial philosophy’sontological spine (or better, spire), is that positive attributes go together: increase one and the othersburgeon concomitantly. That the longevity of mountains does not make them wise any more thanlightning’s power makes it long-lasting is no refutation of that claim, for the claim concerns deepstructures only. Lightning and mountains belong to the same level of reality—the physical—and onany single level, qualities group and regroup in all manner of ways to allow for variety. It is only incrossing ontological lines, in ways analogous to passing from the quantum to the atomic level inphysics, that qualities keep step with one another. And we can see why this lockstep is required. ToErnst Haeckel’s question of questions, “Is the universe friendly?“, religion answers, finally, yes; inWilliam James’s formulation, “religion says that the best things are the more eternal things, the thingsin the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word.”10 Three categories arealigned in this statement, all in their exemplary modes: value (the best things), time (the more eternalthings), and power (the things that throw the last stone). In a completely meaningful world, they mustthus converge, for the only fully satisfactory explanation for the way things are is that they should bethat way. The charge that attention to teleological considerations of this sort reduces the perennialphilosophy to a rationale for wishful thinking will be dealt with in the “Flakes of Fire” essay in PartThree, but we can anticipate what will be said there to the extent of a single sentence. As thehypothesis that this is a good world and that fuller understanding will carry us beyond appearances tothe contrary is the most fruitful working hypothesis there is; it is the metaphysical counterpart ofscience’s working premise that cancer has a cause even if it is not yet known. To explore thishypothesis energetically is a sign of health rather than pathology as long as facts are not blinked alongthe way.

Thus far, the claim of a tiered reality has been broached through images, but it can be statedliterally if we are willing to accept abstractions. To have more being, or be more real, is to possessmore of the properties of Being per se, which include:

a. Power. Even when miniscule, it is always present. Plato seems to have been the first to havesaid that to exist is to exert influence. If there were something that impacted nothing, there would beno way to detect its existence. “What is it to be ‘real’?” William James asked, and answered, “Thebest definition I know is: ‘Anything is real of which we find ourselves obliged to take into account inany way.’” 11 It has the power to make its presence felt.

b. Duration.

c. Locale.

d. Unity. What exists can have parts and usually does, but unless these cohere in a way that givesit an identifiable integrity, it cannot be said to exist; only its components do.

e. Importance. Again this may be small, but to exist to any degree is to count for something.

f. Worth. If nothing is better than something, there is no basis for discussion. Esse qua essebonum est; “being as being is good.”

Other properties may be required, but these suffice for our purpose. We have been asking what itwould mean for X to possess them in higher degree than Y, but to sharpen the contrast we can change“higher” to “highest.” If X’s power were infinite, it would be omnipotent. If its duration had nocutoff, it would be eternal. If its locale were without bounds, it would be omnipresent. If its unitywere uncompromised, it would be simple in the technical sense of harboring no divisions whatever—distinctions, perhaps, but no divisions. If its importance were utter, it would be absolute. If its worthwere categorical, it would be perfect.

These are, of course, the attributes of God, and all theists will subscribe to a hierarchy of atleast two levels (God and the world), as will metaphysicians who distinguish in some way betweenthe Absolute and the relative. A simple dichotomy, though, is inadequate for the distinctions that areneeded; both God and the world must be qualified, God by separating his knowable from hisunknowable aspects, the world by distinguishing its invisible from its visible features. For to repeatthe criteria that require levels to be demarcated in the first place, each of the four we now have inview—God unmanifest, God manifest; world invisible, world visible—has an importantly distinctpopulation and distinctive ways in which its members interact. The number four oversimplifies, butthese four broad divisions (appearing as they do explicitly in all known civilizations and implicitly invirtually every studied tribe) appear to be the minimum that collectivities must respect if theiroutlooks are to mesh reasonably with the way things are. Individuals can get along with less than four,but not societies if they are to accommodate the full range of spiritual personality types that surfaceeverywhere. My Forgotten Truth takes the description of the four levels as its primary task; here theycan only be identified. A supplementing identification appears in the essay “Excluded Knowledge” onpages 93-95. The reader may wish to glance ahead to it, for both descriptions are brief, and togetherthey may deepen like a stereopticon the view here being presented.

Listed in the order of diminishing reality as the eye moves down the page, the four principallevels of existence are the following:

God unmanifest: the ineffable Godhead or the Infinite.

God manifest: God clothed with personal attributes. Ontologically, the celestial plane.

The world in its invisible aspects: subjectively, mind, thoughts, and feelings; objectively, demons, ghosts, and shamanicallies; the intermediate plane.12

The world as (in principle) visible: space, time, and matter; the terrestrial plane.

As the God/world distinction is relatively standard, I shall ride on it and identify the four levelsby the additional cuts that are needed on each side of that initial divide. In Forgotten Truth Idistinguished God from the Godhead (Boehme’s ungrund; Tillich’s God-above-God; Eckhart’sGottheit) by defining the former as personal and the latter transpersonal, but this now strikes me as atactical mistake. It is not wrong, but we have so much difficulty imagining anything superior topersons that, whatever is actually said, the impression that is conveyed in denying the attribute“personal” to the Godhead is that it must be subpersonal, rather than suprapersonal as the distinctionintends. This misunderstanding can be avoided if we draw the line instead between aspects ofdivinity our minds can grasp—its personal aspect included—and ones that outdistancecomprehension categorically. When, two paragraphs above, the pinnacle of being was said to beomnipresent, eternal, and the like, God was in focus. In the Godhead, these superlatives are notwithdrawn; they are, rather, advanced beyond the range of our imaginings and fused into a unityreason cannot penetrate. There is an age when a child may look at you earnestly and deliver a long,pleased speech in which the inflections of spoken English are perfectly reflected, yet not a singlesyllable is intelligible. There is no way you can tell the child that she has done marvels with themelody but, since language also makes sense, she has not gotten very far with it. Something like this isinvolved in the God to Godhead move; the language of theism gets God’s melody right, but the sensethat is hidden in his final depths rises above it. In technical terms, God is the object of kataphatictheology (what can be spoken), the via affirmativa; whereas Godhead is the object of apophatictheology (what cannot be spoken), the via negativa. The line is not hard and fast, but priests andprophets tend to focus on God, mystics on the Godhead. And the latter tell us that in those rare,supernatural moments when the Godhead is directly disclosed to man, what man then sees is that hecannot understand its character at all. It is not that depths of its nature remain opaque and ineffable; itssimplicity precludes ladling things out this way. Its entire nature reposes in depth unfathomable. Sothe incomprehensibility of the Godhead becomes evident at the precise moment that its nature is mostclearly apprehended—there is no way to state the point less paradoxically. In the light of mysticalvision, the Godhead’s hiddenness is not dispelled; it appears. Not that there are two Gods, of course.It is just that his/her single nature does not stop where our minds do.

As we turn from God to the world, its material countenance greets us most emphatically, yet weneed only close our eyes to find ourselves in a totally different medium: the world of direct,immediate, inner awareness. Idealists have tried to reduce matter to mind and materialists theopposite, but neither has carried the day. The difference between inner and outer, subjective andobjective, the living and the dead, cannot easily be argued away. I shall not try to say here where theline should be drawn between the terms in these pairs; a small run on the point appears on pages 93-94 below. Those who wish to pursue it further can turn to chapters three and four in Forgotten Truth.It is enough to say that the great chain of being places mind ahead of matter not only in its worth but inits power and extent as well; thereby it runs counter to current suppositions. The essays that followargue that these suppositions derive from modernity’s having tailored its outlook excessively to

science which sees how far things can be (a) explained in terms of ones that are simpler, and (b)controlled by altering these simpler components. The attention to “upward causation” that resultsfrom this approach has rubbed off onto the modern outlook as a whole, causing it to assume thatinfluence per se flows predominantly from less to more. Yet even in science we sometimes catchglimpses of the opposite possibility.

Item. Together with time and mass/energy, size (space) is a property of matter; things in theupper three realms do not have to conform to it. Yet power stands in inverse ratio to size. The well-founded law that the shorter the wavelength the larger the energy that is compressed into it, producesthe conclusion that “in a thimbleful of vacuum there is more…energy than would be released by allthe atomic bomb fuel in the universe.”13 Stated in terms of particles instead of waves,

the amount of energy associated with light corpuscles increases as the size is reduced.…The energy necessary to create aproton is contained in a light pulse only about 1013 centimeter in diameter. And the energy of a million protons would becontained in a light pulse a million times smaller.14

As the principle has no theoretical limit, speculation races toward the prospect that the energy ofsomething that has no size at all—God?—might be infinite.

Item. Turning from physics to biology, we find the Gaia Hypothesis suggesting that causationdescends from the animate to the inanimate in ways we had not suspected. Standard evolutionarytheory depicts life as threading its way upward in an environment that is its opposite in being dead.The Gaia Hypothesis reverses this, suggesting that the remarkable life-supporting stability andcoherence of the biosphere make it more plausible to think of it as some sort of enormous developingembryo. The earth is itself a form of life, says J. E. Lovelock, “a complex entity involving the Earth’sbiosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic systemwhich seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet. The physical andchemical condition of the surface of the Earth, of the atmosphere, and of the oceans has been and isactively made fit and comfortable by the presence of life itself.”15 Lewis Thomas notes that thishypothesis:

is beginning to stir up a few signs of storm, and if it catches on, as I think it will, we will soon find the biological communitysplit into fuming factions, one side saying that the evolved biosphere displays evidence of design and purpose, the otherdecrying such heresy. 16

The underlying question is whether the less or the more has the greater influence, and I haveincluded these two items from science because major shifts in perspective are difficult and help fromevery quarter is useful.

In essential (if barest) outline, the primordial metaphysics is now before us. Before proceedingto the psychology and ethics that follow from it, let me state five features which, once thismetaphysics had come to focus for me, I found impressive:

1. There is the sheer quantity of material it “gestalts” into a meaningful pattern. Its hierarchicalcharacter deserves much of the credit for this achievement, for chains of command are a proven wayof introducing order into large numbers. An army without staff and line would be a mere rabble, and

something of the same can be said of worldviews. The computer scientist Herbert Simon hasdescribed, in a parable, the efficiency that hierarchies make possible, and because it applies in itsown way to the hierarchy in the great chain of being, the parable is worth inserting. Twowatchmakers, Hora and Tempus, both make watches composed of a thousand parts each. Horaassembles his watches piece by piece, so when he drops a watch he is working on it falls to piecesand he must begin from scratch. Tempus, for his part, assembles sub-assemblies of ten parts each,joins ten of these to make a larger subassembly of a hundred units, and then joins ten of these to makea complete watch. If he drops a part he is working on, he will have to repeat at most ten assemblingoperations and possibly none. If we assume a ratio of one mishap in a hundred operations, it will takeHora four thousand times longer to assemble a watch; if Tempus can do it in a day, it will take Horaeleven years. And if for mechanical parts we substitute amino acids, protein molecules, organelles,and so on, the ratio between time scales becomes astronomical.

The levels of reality in the great chain of being form an analogue to the assemblies andsubassemblies of Hora’s watch. Each can be studied separately, after which only a manageablenumber of moves are required to bring them into an ordered whole. The marvels of the terrestrialplane are being unveiled at an astonishing rate by the physical sciences. The intermediate realm addslife and consciousness; biology helps with the former, and for light on the latter we can turn to thedurable findings of phenomenology, depth psychology, and parapsychology, as well as aspects ofshamanism and folk religion. The theologies of the great traditions describe God’s knowable nature(the celestial plane) from a variety of cultural angles, and the literature of mysticism carries the mindas far as it can journey into God’s absolute and infinite depths. Is anything of importance omitted inthis ontic list? All worldviews must take account of everything in some way, but many do so bydenying the existence of things their rivals consider important. Is it only because the perennialphilosophy strikes me as true that it seems more generous in this regard? It validates so much thatpeoples have lived by. Many philosophies have no place for parapsychology, Jungian archetypes, oreven phenomenology; many theologies no place for mysticism, other religions, or what falls under therubric of folk religion. In the perennial philosophy, these are all accorded a respectful place; inscience, too, of course. It is as if the perennial philosophy were to say to the others: You are right inwhat you affirm. Only what you deny needs rethinking.

2. Not that it is all things to all people. If “a place for everything” shows its generous side, thesequel it appends, “and everything in its place,” reveals its uncompromising, adamantine edge. Thatthe lesser things (the lower rungs of being) really are inferior—to say nothing of not being the wholestory—is, in its eyes, true and therefore not negotiable. Those who do not believe that higher realmsexist will naturally not accept this. Such disagreements are unavoidable—worlds were not made forone another—but better serious controversy than a flabby tolerance that places togetherness ahead oftruth. The point is that the perennial philosophy is not relativistic, and this is a second thing that feelsright about it. In calling his epochal discovery “relativity,” Einstein all but named our age, which isriddled with relativities of unbelievable variety,17 but what he actually unearthed was its opposite:invariance—the constancy of light’s speed despite the apparent confusions, illusions, andcontradictions produced by the relative motions or actions of gravity. It would have been better ifEinstein had called his discovery “the invariance theory,” as he considered doing, for not only isinvariance more fundamental than the relativities it explains, it signals better what truth is after.

“Timeless truth” sounds almost like a contradiction in terms today, but we need to believe that thetruth we seek is rooted in the unchanging depths of the universe. For were it not, would it be worth thecost of the search, to say nothing of the cost it exacts once the discovery is made? More on the latterpoint in the section on ethics that follows.

3. Absolutes can lock one into a limited perspective, and as all perspectives are limited, somethinkers now nominate iconoclasm—the smashing of ideologies and all conceptual schemes—for theruling virtue. This sounds a little like trying to run a farm by careful weeding and no planting, but thedanger that prompts it is real, and the third thing that appeals to me in the perennial philosophy is theway it handles this issue. The problem—our need to believe while remaining open to better beliefsand what lies beyond belief altogether18—must be resolved existentially, through living it, but theguidelines the perennial philosophy proposes seem right: In insisting that the final reality, the Infinite,is radically ineffable, it relativizes all concepts, formulations, and systems vis-à-vis it—the fingerpointing at the moon is not the moon itself; “all things pass save for the face of God” (the Qur’an).Meanwhile, the confident orientation life needs if it is to be lived well is met by saying that within theballpark of outlooks and theories—at the human level, the game of life must in part be played in thatpark—this outlook carries the day and will yield tomorrow only to fresh and perhaps improvedexpressions that continue its general trajectory.

4. This last statement may confirm a suspicion that could have been germinating for some time;namely, that the unchanging character of this philosophy—its static quality, if you will, as embossedin its very name, “perennial”—gives it a somewhat stagnant air. Where is the sense of intellectualexcitement, the prospect of new worlds to discover? The answer brings us to the fourth feature of theperennial philosophy that I find convincing. No more in this philosophy than in any other is there theprospect of a stopping point in this life. The questions are: where does one want to go, and with what,one’s mind only, or one’s total self?

In the domain of mind, a distinction must be drawn between cumulative and noncumulative truth;we find the first kind in history and science where information snowballs, and the second kind inmetaphysics, religion, and art where it does not. In the latter triumvirate, a restless, insatiable appetitefor novelty is like compulsive eating—fed by a disordered drive. What, twenty-five hundred yearslater, do we know about evil that Job did not know? That the question is rhetorical in no way meansthat adventure and discovery disappear. Their place in noncumulative knowledge is as lively asanywhere, but they face in a different, more important, direction: toward a deeper understanding oftruths that are inexhaustible, and beyond this—here we move from mind to the total self—to theseasoning of one’s being so understanding may phase into realization. The reservoir of noncumulativeknowledge no more needs augmenting than, in the eyes of Robert Coles, Research Professor ofPsychiatry at Harvard University, the data bank of psychiatry requires increase. Fully aware that toquestion the need for more research in that field is the gravest heresy one can risk, Coles proceeds toask:

What will psychiatry ever know that it does not know now about the damage done by thoughtless, cruel parents to vulnerablechildren? What further “frontiers” do we really have to conquer, when it comes to such subjects as despair, brutality, envy?

His answer:

There is not much left for us to discover about man’s fantasies, dreams, wishes, and doubts. The dynamics are all on thetable, and in a way were there before Freud ever came along, as he acknowledged more than once.…We know all there is toknow.19

When this statement is placed beside the following (by Frithjof Schuon) for the perennial philosophy,the similarity on the underlying point is striking.

Few topics are so unrewarding as conventional laments about the “researches of the human mind” never being satisfied; infact everything has been said already, though it is far from being the case that everyone has always understood it. There cantherefore be no question of presenting “new truths”; what is needed in our time…is to provide some people with keysfashioned afresh—keys no better than the old ones but merely more elaborated—in an eternal script in the very substance ofman’s spirit.20

5. A fifth feature of the perennial philosophy I found compelling will complete my list: its onticexuberance. Today it is mostly the sciences that are exuberant as they unveil a nature extravagantbeyond belief. A million suns bursting into being each hour—it has been some time since a claim incontemporary philosophy knocked me down like that one did, yet it is no more than the latest sampleto have chanced my way. What is hard to realize concretely is that the perennial philosophy upstagesthe best show science can stage. For without backing off in the slightest on numbers, that philosophymakes, as it were, a right-angle turn into a wholly new dimension: that of quality—qualitativeexperience, we might say, to make sure that it is not abstractions that we are talking about. To seewhat this involves, we might try to imagine the qualitative difference between the experience of awood tick and ourselves, and then, continuing on in the same expanding direction, introduce orders ofmagnitude that science has accustomed us to: 1023 or whatever. Or collapse to the size of a drop thedegree of reality in the terrestrial plane and then imagine the intermediate plane as an ocean—notoceanically large, but oceanically more real—balanced on top of it, repeating the operation(intermediate plane reduced to a drop, celestial plane the supervening ocean) until the Infinite isreached. If our imaginations could concretely effect such moves, we would have no difficultyunderstanding Plato’s exclamation: “First a shudder runs through me, and then the old awe creepsover me.”

To speak of upper planes as more real does not imply that lower ones are unreal or illusory—only less real. Nor does it impugn their worth, for not only does each have its place in the entirescheme; matter anywhere, hosting its master, can become a temple of its Lord. Though I have tried tooffset the suspicion that higher and lower on the chain of being involve spatial separation, it may helpif we convert the chain into concentric circles with the lower, lesser realms located inside the higherones in which they “live and move and have their being.” Always, the less is permeated by the more;the problem is to see this. But it can be seen. “There is no rung of being on which you cannot find theHoliness of being,” Martin Buber said. “God’s is-ness (istigkect) is my is-ness, neither less normore,” said Meister Eckhart. And Hakuin:

This earth whereon we stand, is the shining Lotus Land,And this body is the body of Buddha.(“Chant in Praise of Zazen”)

With the metaphysics of the perennial philosophy in place, the essentials of its psychology andethics can be dubbed in quickly.

II. Psychology

“The psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality”

I know of no more efficient way to elucidate Huxley’s summary here than through a commentary onthe diagram from Forgotten Truth on the following page.

In his Religio Medici, Sir Thomas Browne wrote, “Man is the great amphibian whose nature isdisposed to live, not only like other creatures in diverse elements, but in divided and distinguishedworlds.” These “divided and distinguished worlds” are the multiple levels of reality the precedingsection set forth, and in the perennial psychology the human self intersects them all. That they erupt ininverse order, the lesser now appearing above the greater (body above mind, etc.) is appropriate, formicrocosm mirrors macrocosm (man mirrors the universe), and mirrors invert. Envisioned externally,the good dons metaphors of height; but when we reverse our gaze and look inward, our value-imagerytransposes: it turns over. Within us, the best lies deepest; it is basic, fundamental, the ground of ourbeing. The way body and mind correlate with the terrestrial and intermediate planes is obvious; theformer swim, as it were, in the latter. Theists will have no difficulty recognizing the soul—final locusof our individuality—as engaged in I-Thou relation with the knowable God. More controversial is thecontention that (in Huxley’s formulation) there is “in the soul (see diagram below) something similarto, or even identical with, divine Reality”—Eckhart’s “something in the soul that is uncreated anduncreatable.” In the diagram, this something is named Spirit.

The lines of the dispute have, in the course of the centuries, become recognizable. If you persistin walking north, there comes a moment when, though you think you are still headed north, you are

actually moving south, for in the preceding step you unwittingly crossed the North Pole. Theists usethis analogy to argue that though mystics think they are entering deeper into God’s nature with theirnotions of Spirit and Infinite, they are actually departing from the living God who is Lord of history,particularity, community, and decision. This is not the place (even were there the wish) to argue themystic’s reply to this objection. The issue is rich in subtleties; what, for example, is one to make ofSaint Paul’s assertion that “the word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edgedsword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit” (Hebrews 4:12, emphasis added;see preceding diagram where soul and spirit are demarcated)? But as the perennial psychologyobviously allows an important place for the mystic, reasons must be given for its doing so.

No feature of our nature is more undeniable than its duality: we have a “me” that iscircumscribed, and an “I” which, in its awareness of this circumscription, gives evidence of beingitself exempt from it. The mystic is drawn to this “I”; s/he fixes on it, labors to develop his/her senseof its reality, and generally tries to identify with it as much as possible. And as noncircumscription isits essence, there is nothing that separates it in principle from the Infinite. Unconsciously dwelling atour inmost center; beneath the surface shuttlings of our sensations, precepts, and thoughts; wrapped inthe envelope of soul (which, too, is finally porous) is the Eternal and the Divine, the final Reality. Itis not soul, not personality, but All-Self beyond all selfishness; it is Spirit enwombed in matter andwrapped round with psychic traces. Within every phantom self dwells this Divine; within allcreatures incarnate sleeps the Infinite Sentience—unevolved, hidden, unfelt, unknown, yet destinedfrom all eternity to waken at last and, tearing away the ghostly web of sensuous mind, break foreverits chrysalis of flesh and pass beyond all space and time.

In the language of the great affirmations, spirit is the Atman that is Brahman, the Buddha-naturethat appears when our finite selves get out of its way, my istigkect (is-ness) which, once we stopstanding in our own light, we see is God’s is-ness. Back of every wave stands the entire ocean; “thedeeper I go within myself, the more I find that which is beyond myself,” as Gabriel Marcel said. Wecatch glimmers of this unbounded “I” in moments when we are so totally engrossed in a task that noattention for our finite self remains—in I/me terms, no “me” appears at all. The need, though, is not totry to anticipate what this desideratum would be like, but rather to see that life’s ballast can lodge atany of the four levels of selfhood our diagram depicts; all are present in everyone, but they areactualized to different degrees. In a catalogue that would sound elitist and self-righteous if it were notread as a project for oneself:

a life that identifies primarily with its physical pleasures and needs (“getting and spending we lay waste our days”)issuperficial;

one that advances its attention to mind can be interesting;

if it moves on to the heart (synonym for soul) it can be good;

and if it passes on to Spirit—that saving self-forgetfulness and egalitarianism in which one’s personal interests loom no largerthan those of others—it would be perfect.

How far life can move in this direction may be left an open question. It is the direction that isindicated that counts. How far we have moved toward it is indeterminable. It belongs to maya(illusion) and is therefore unimportant.

What needs to be added is the epistemological bearing of this “ballast lowering,” if we may

continue to use this metaphor for the deepening of self that results as its center of gravity settlesprogressively into the arms of being and becomes more stable in consequence. The perennialepistemology respects reason, but in the way one respects a fine tool; what it accomplishes dependsmore on who uses it than its own perfection. If it is a power tool, we can visualize outlets on thevarious levels of being, but now let science fiction enter. The power that increases as the outletsascend is magical in enabling the tool (reason) to accomplish qualitatively greater marvels as itpasses from one to the next; the higher the socket into which reason is plugged, the greater thewonders it can effect. In this somewhat cumbersome image, the outlets represent an intellectivecapacity that empowers reason and provides the degree of luminosity it enjoys but which must beclearly distinguished from reason. Call it the intuitive intellect and see that, while it is always fullypresent in everyone in the way Spirit is—in the end it is Spirit, but that’s a different story—it isactualized to different degrees as the differently powered sockets suggest. If it is not too awkward tojoin the power-tool image to the earlier one of ontological ballast, the picture that results is asfollows: reason plugged in to a life that is fixated on the bodily level will detect little more thanmatter and will spin a materialistic worldview. Things other than matter will be evident to someonewho takes his mind seriously, and his reason will fashion an outlook that ranges from animism intraditional societies to naturalism (as distinct from materialism) in the contemporary West. To thosewho, their hearts having been opened, can see with its eye (the Sufi’s “eye of the heart”; Plato’s “eyeof the soul”), spiritual objects will be discernible and a theistic metaphysics will emerge. The final“night vision” which can detect the awefilled holiness of everything is reserved for those whom, inthis essay, I have called mystics.

A section that has already become something of a junkyard for metaphors can stand one more.The divisions between the levels of reality are like one-way mirrors. Looking up, we see onlyreflections of the level we are on; looking down, the mirrors become plate glass and cease to exist.On the highest plane, even the glass is removed, and immanence reigns. To anticipate the sentence thatbegins the next section: Looking up from planes that are lower, God is radically transcendent (ganzanders; “wholly other”); looking down, from heights that human vision (too) can attain to varyingdegrees, God is absolutely immanent.

III. Ethic

“The ethic that places man,’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Groundof all being”

A few years ago the Review of Metaphysics published an essay by Jacob Needleman with thearresting title, “Why Philosophy is Easy.” In the past, Needleman noted, philosophy was thought to beanything but easy. Only the ablest citizens were expected to undertake it, and even they, only aftertraining not only their minds but their bodies, their emotions, and their wills as well. This has, ofcourse, changed. Today everyone is encouraged to try his or her hand at the art, even high schoolstudents. The switch has occurred because rational abilities are now considered the onlyprerequisites. The reason the other abilities have been dropped, Needleman goes on to say, is that thewisdom the modern philosopher seeks through his philosophy is no longer a new state of being. “The

abandonment of this [former] objective more than any single conceptualized point of view,” heconcludes, is what “distinguishes modern philosophy from so much of ancient and medievalphilosophy.”21

The difference becomes apparent when we note the kinds of experience the two philosophiesappeal to. Modern philosophy’s touchstone is generic experience: experiences of perception,linguistic usage, moral decisions, and the like, that are familiar to us all. Because Ernest Gellner isunique in being not only a philosopher in his own right but also a sociologist who studiesphilosophers and their discipline professionally, I shall refer to his findings more than once in theseessays. His report on the present point is that beliefs, if they are to be considered legitimate today,must pass “the empiricist insistence that [they] be judged by…something reasonably close to theordinary notion of experience.”22 This comes close to being the exact opposite of philosophy’s formergoal, which was to realign the components of the soul in ways that would enable it to experience theworld in an unordinary way—a way so extraordinary, in fact, that from its perspective, passion-and-ignorance-laden ordinary experience seems almost psychotic. It is the abandonment of this former,exalted objective that makes contemporary philosophy relatively easy.

I have used Needleman’s point to introduce this brief section on ethics because it helps us toposition ethics in the primordial outlook. An ethic is an assemblage of guidelines for effecting theself-transformation that enables the world to be experienced in a new way. In doing so, it is integrallyrelated to anthropology on the one hand and epistemology and ontology on the other: revised,reformed conduct (ethics) leads to a new condition of self (anthropology) which includes as itsprincipal yield the capacity to see and know (epistemology) the world (ontology) more truly as it is.23

As for the content of the primordial ethic—the ethic which in The Abolition of Man C. S. Lewissays all the major traditions of the world agree on—it condenses (in Western idiom) in the virtues ofhumility, charity, and veracity; while alternatively (expressed negatively and in Asian idiom), itfocuses on the three poisons that work against those virtues, those poisons being greed, aversion, andignorance. Humility has nothing to do with low self-esteem. It is the capacity to distance oneself fromone’s private, separate ego to the point where one can see it objectively and therefore accurately, ascounting for one, but not more than one; even as charity sees one’s neighbor as counting fully as one.Both these initial virtues, which pertain to the human order, announce the arrival into that order of thethird virtue, veracity—the capacity to see things in what Buddhists call their suchness; the way theyactually, accurately, objectively are. With self and other made interchangeable through this objective,numerical “one,” humility is seen as looking on oneself as if one were another (and as severely astruth allows, but not more), while charity is to look on the other as if he were oneself (as indulgentlyas truth allows, but again not more). These terse pronouncements show that the primordial ethic in noway neglects the interpersonal, but as its attention never strays far from the whole, what comesthrough most strongly in its ethical discussions is the cosmic alignment that the virtues effect. To pickup again with humility: to be freed of self is to become emptied and hollow; in this hollow, as AnnieDillard says, you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall. Or to tie the hollowness tosound, for our ears to hear the music of the spheres its amplitude must be raised. We must turnourselves into resounding songboxes, carving out careful emptinesses like those in cellos and violins.

To return to epistemology, if wisdom, the capacity to see things as they truly are, is a correlate ofvirtue,24 it requires methods for acquiring that virtue. It is not necessary here to detail those methods,the spiritual exercises and “eightfold paths” of the various historical traditions; only the general point

need be noted. The perennial philosophy is a path to be walked as much as it is a map that charts thatpath. Knowing and doing, wisdom and method, work together; they walk hand in hand. Close from thestart, they draw increasingly so, to the point where it becomes difficult to tell them apart. In MarcoPallis’s formulation, wisdom comes to look increasingly like static method (counsels as to how tolive) and method like dynamic wisdom (the way wisdom would appear were it enacted).

Two final points:First. Against the current tendency to glorify one’s own inner promptings—the state of “Saint

Ego” wherein nothing seems quite as wonderful and worth heeding as some aspect of one’s owninclinations—the primordial outlook notes that if those promptings were reliable, we would be at theend of our journey, not its start. The most useful service they can perform is to guide one to a traditionthat contains the winnowed wisdom of a civilization or culture. It is difficult to imagine a verdict thatfavors that wisdom over private judgment more categorically than this one by the social psychologistDonald Campbell—that he arrives at it through scientific considerations only augments its force. “Onevolutionary grounds,” Campbell writes,

it is just as rational to follow religious traditions which one does not understand as it is rational to continue breathing air beforeone understands the role of oxygen in bodily metabolism. If modern psychology and social science disagree with religioustradition on ways of living one should, on rational and scientific grounds, choose the traditional recipes for life for these arethe better tested. Priests who narrow the precious tradition which they transmit to that pittance which they themselves canunderstand and agree with are neglecting their duty and are guilty of hubris or pretension of omniscience.25

Second. I have spoken here only of ethic’s, personal dimension. Social ethics is morecomplicated and is reserved for essay number nine, in Part Three.

Part Three

LOOKING AROUNDA View of Our Times

When the primordial tradition first jumped seriously to my attention, my mind had evidentlyreached a stage of saturated solution which needed but the shock of the right contact torecrystallize in forms that were a revelation. The world they brought to view was not categoricallydifferent; it was rather that it glistened in sharp focus.

When invitations came my way to comment on several aspects of contemporary culture—higher education, the humanities, theology, science, and the place of social concern—I found Inow had things I wanted to say. The essays that register those thoughts form the third section ofthis book, beginning with the current state of higher education.

4

Higher Education: Excluded Knowledge

The learning of the imagination can remain an excluded knowledge only so long as the premises ofmaterial science remain unquestioned and their exclusions undetected.

—Kathleen Raine

The editor of Teachers College Record, from which this essay is reprinted, has done somethingunusual. He has invited me to present my thoughts precisely because they “are not shared by mosteducators today,” which is to say, not shared by most readers of this journal. I have been eager to geton with some other work, but I find this concern to get at fundamental issues compelling. I shall writein a personal vein because I think that an indication of how I came to the atypical views that haveimpressed themselves on me will help throw into relief what those views are. And if (beginning withmy title) I sound argumentative, I hope the reader will understand that this is to get huge issues intosharp focus in small compass.

I begin with the journey that brought me to where I now am.

I. Preliminaries

My first book chanced to be on education.* It was well received. Robert Ulich, the grand old man ofeducational philosophy at that time, rated it above the famed 1945 “Redbook,”Harvard University’sGeneral Education in a Free Society.

Thanks to this early and almost fortuitous venture into educational theory, the professionals inthat field seem for twenty years to have considered me one of them—at least I have felt included.When teaching encountered the new medium of television, the American Council on Education askedme to consider the implications.1 The American Broadcasting Company included me in its 1962“Meet the Professor” series. I was invited to deliver the 1964 Annual Lecture to The John DeweySociety,2 and in that same year to assess the state of the humanities for the fiftieth anniversary issue ofLiberal Education3 When T-groups and “encounter” came along, the National Training Laboratories,an arm of the National Education Association, invited me to Bethel, Maine, to consider the role ofgroup dynamics in the learning process.4 When political rumbles broke out on college campuses in thelate 1960s, Phi Beta Kappa asked me for an analysis of the traumas Vietnam and other factors wereoccasioning higher education.51 have lost count of the educational conferences I have participated in,but find that at least two produced printed fallout.6

I have included these autobiographical paragraphs to make the point that in educational theory Ihave not been an outsider. For the bulk of my career, I have been emphatically “in.” Why, then, am Inow out?—“out,” I want to stress, only in that my views are no longer mainstream, not that myfeelings are estranged. The shape of my ideas may have taken a curious turn, but my interests in ideasthemselves has never been livelier. I remain a teacher,# and I have never doubted that given thevocational slots of the modern world, the university is my home.

As for the content of my thoughts, which (as has been indicated) now run rather counter to theprevailing academic mind-set, they are spelled out in the book that brought the invitation to write thisessay. Titled Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition, it was published by Harper and Row in1976 and the subtitle changed to The Common Vision of the World’s Religions in the HarperSanFrancisco printing of 1992. I shall be itemizing that book’s key claims and arguing their validity, butbefore doing so, let me enter a final propaedeutic. I want to note how the opposition between truth asI now see it and the prevailing contemporary mind-set broke upon my awareness.

It came into view through the conjunction of two elements that, once I got them sorted out,bounced off each other like antagonists. Even so, they had no choice but to keep on interacting—honing my perceptions of each; getting their outlines into clearer and clearer focus—because bothwere locked within me. Call the components East and West or past and present, the facts are that Iwas born and raised in China and sometime later found myself teaching at MIT. A more unlikelyconjunction of opposites would be difficult to imagine. China (the China of my boyhood at least)represented tradition and the past, whereas MIT stood for “the future in microcosm,” as its publicrelations staff liked to say. China was religious (folk religion, mostly, but religious all the same),whereas MIT was secular—its chapel has no windows, as if the architect were saying, “No hope fortranscendence here unless you blot the Institute out completely.” And China was humanistic, whereasMIT was scientific.

Pulled in these opposite directions, my fifteen years in Cambridge were tumultuous. They werealso exhilarating, absorbing, and above all, instructive. As they progressed, I first discovered anorganic connection between the three terms on each side of the divide: optimally defined, it seemed tome, “traditional,” “religious,” and “humanistic” have more in common than I had realized, as do“modern,” “secular,” and “scientific.” But then came the surprise. I found that if I stayed with theproblem instead of capitulating to accepted ways of construing things—giving in to Bacon’s “idols ofthe theater”—there was no way I could avoid the conclusion that truth sides more with the first ofthese two sets of triumvirates than with the second.

Before I say why that conclusion seemed forced on me, let me introduce the two antagonists—the two contenders for truth—more properly. For simplicity’s sake, I shall refer to the first triumvirateas tradition and the second as modernity. The gist of their differences is that modernity, spawnedessentially by modern science, stresses quantity (in order to get at power and control)7 whereastradition stresses quality (and the participation that is control’s alternative). That’s the nub of thematter, but the assertion is compact, so I shall unpack it.

The point is this. Before the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century, the entire world,humanly speaking,8 was wrapped in an outlook that had embraced it from its start, the outlook that thepreceding chapter of this book calls “The Primordial Tradition.” I should remind the reader of thatoutlook because it is for me the backdrop of the present essay, but let me back into doing so. As itwas science that unhorsed tradition, if we understand what science is we shall be on our way toward

understanding the soul of the perspective it dislodged.

II. The Nature of Science

I agree with those who say that science is not one thing, but to conclude that its multiple facets arejoined by no more than “family resemblances” gives up the hunt too quickly.9 There is a discerniblethrust to these facets, which this diagram from my book Forgotten Truth is designed to identify.

No knowledge deserves to be called scientific unless it is objective in the sense of laying claimto intersubjective agreement. Many things meet this initial requirement, however, without beingscientific in any rigorous sense—court testimony, for example. We move closer to science properwhen we come to truths that enable us to predict—what cannot be falsified is not scientific10—andcloser still when we reach truths that facilitate control. Each move we make toward the center findsour knowing increasingly locked into mathematics, number being (as is often remarked) the languageof science. Numbers lend themselves to the objectivity and precision science seeks because, unlikewords, they are unambiguous—more on this later.

The achievements of this thrust toward truth—I am thinking of the noetic achievement of purescience quite as much as the industrial achievements of technology—have been so dazzling that theyhave blinded us to the fact that they are products of an exceedingly restricted kind of knowing. Notewhat falls outside its ken:

Intrinsic and Normative Values“Values. A terrible business. You can at best stammer when you talk about them,” Wittgensteinremarked, illustrating his point by the very form of his utterance. Science can deal with instrumentalvalues but not intrinsic ones. It can tell us that nonsmoking is conducive to health, but whether healthis intrinsically better than somatic gratification it cannot adjudicate. Again, it can determine whatpeople do like (descriptive values) but not what they should like (normative values). Market researchand opinion polls come close to being exact sciences, but there will never be a science of thesummum bonum, the highest good.”

PurposesTo attribute an intentional character to what happens in nature is anthropomorphic, andanthropomorphic explanations are the opposite of scientific ones. For science to get to work,

Aristotle’s final causes had to be banished and the field left free for explanation in terms of efficientcauses only. “The cornerstone of scientific method is…the systematic denial that ‘true’ knowledgecan be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes—that is to say, of ‘purpose.’”11

Global and Existential MeaningsScience itself is meaningful throughout, but there are two kinds of meaning it cannot get at. One ofthese is global meanings—what is the meaning of it all? It is as if the scientist were inside a largeplastic balloon; he can shine his torch anywhere on the balloon’s interior but cannot climb outside theballoon to view it as a whole, see where it is situated, or determine why it was fabricated. The otherkind of meaning science cannot handle is existential: it is powerless to force the human mind to findits discoveries meaningful. Let the discovery be as impressive as you please; the knower always hasthe option to shrug his shoulders and walk away. Having no handle on meanings of these two specifickinds, science “fails in the face of all ultimate questions” (Jaspers) and leaves “the problems oflife…completely untouched” (Wittgenstein).

QualityThis is basic to the lot, for it is their qualitative dimensions that give values, meanings, and purposestheir pride of place in life. Yet it is precisely this qualitative dimension that eludes the quantitativemeasuring grid that science must at least try to impose on events if they are to become precise data.Certain qualities (such as tones or colors) are connected with quantifiable substrates (light waves ofvarying lengths), but quality itself is unmeasurable. Being a subjective experience, it cannot be laidout on a public chopping block; being a simple experience, it cannot be dissected evenintrospectively. In consequence, it is “refractory to measurement”—not just provisionally, but inprinciple.

We cannot say that in experience one light has twice the brightness of another. The terms in which we measure experienceof a sound are not terms of experience. They are terms of the stimulus, the physical sound, or of the nervous or other bodilyaction concomitant with the experience.…The search…for a scale of equivalence between energy and mental experiencearrives at none.12

Qualities are either perceived for what they are or they are not so perceived, and nothing canconvey their nature to anyone who cannot perceive it directly. The most that one can do is to comparethings that have a quality with things that do not, and even then the comparison is meaningful only topersons who know from experience what the quality in question is. Science’s inability to deal withthe qualitatively unmeasurable leaves it dealing with what Lewis Mumford called a “disqualifieduniverse.” In the years that have intervened between the second and third editions of this book, I haveadded two more things that science can’t handle—invisibles that cannot be inferred from their visiblesubstrates, and things that are superior to human beings—but the four that I have described heresuffice for present purposes.

This account of what science cannot deal with is certain to encounter resistance. Not, as far as Ihave been able to discover, because it is untrue. All that would be required to show that it is untruewould be a counterexample—a single instance in which science has produced precise and provableknowledge concerning a normative value, a final cause, an existential or global meaning, or anintrinsic quality. Considering the importance of these four domains for human life—for three hundred

years humanity has all but held its breath waiting for science to close in on them—the fact that it hasmade no inroads whatever would seem to be a clear sign that science is not fashioned to deal withthem. The reason we resist science’s limitations is not factual but psychological—we don’t want toface up to them. For science is what the modern world believes in. Since it has authored our world, tolose faith in it, as to some extent we must if we admit that its competence is limited, is to lose faith inour kind of world. Such loss of faith would be comparable to the crisis that would have visited theMiddle Ages had it suddenly discovered that God was only semicompetent—that he was not God butjust another god. The fall of a God is no small matter.

The moves to avoid admitting the limitations of science take two turns. It is argued either thatscience is not as I depict it; or that it is, but its character will change.

1. First objection: Science is not as I depict it. It is more flexible, more human, and morehumane than I make it appear.

a. First version: Scientists are as human as the rest of us. Their idealism, warmth, and naturalpiety—a quotation from Einstein on his mystical feeling for the universe can be expected—is as welldeveloped as the next person’s.

Answer: I have said nothing to the contrary. I am talking neither about the persons who discoverscientific truths nor about the ends to which their truths are directed—ends that obviously can beeither helpful or destructive. I am talking about the character of scientific truth itself.

b. Second version: I make it sound as if there were a single scientific method that deliversdiscoveries almost on command, whereas in fact that method—insofar as there is a method in thesingular—is as “human” as any other. It is human both in the noble sense of pivoting on distinctivelyhuman capacities for inspiration and imagination, and in the less noble, “all too human” sense ofbeing subject to pitfalls. Science is fallible. False starts, blind alleys, inhouse vendettas, anddishonesty all figure in its record. (Citations from Michael Polanyi, Thomas Kuhn, Abraham Maslow,and James Watson’s The Double Helix.)

Answer: If the preceding confusion lay in failure to separate scientific truth from the personswho discover it on the one hand, and from the ends to which it is put on the other, the confusion herelies in conflating such truth with the processes by which it is reached—the psychology and sociologyof scientific discovery. The routes by which scientists arrive at their discoveries may be as inspired,diverse, and fallible as one pleases—I personally think Feyerabend’s Against Method goes too far,but I agree that the scientific method can never be completely formalized. But again, that is not what Iam talking about. My eye is not on how scientific knowledge is acquired. It is on the truth itsacquisition process arrives at. Or more precisely, it is on the defining features of such truth—the kindof truth science tries to get at.

c. Third version: I make objectivity the minimum requirement of scientific knowledge just whenwe are coming to see that there is no such thing.

Answer: Here the confusion is between two meanings of objectivity. Science need not beobjective in the sense of claiming to mirror the way things are in themselves—the so-called cameratheory of knowledge. One can even go so far as to say that in its frontier reaches, science says very

little about what nature itself is like; mostly, it tells us how it responds to the experiments we directtoward it, with the result that these experiments must themselves figure in our conclusions as to whathas been disclosed. Knowing of this kind is indeed subjective in the sense of conforming to aknowing subject. But this kind of subjectivity does not touch the objectivity science demands as itsadmissions ticket, which (to repeat) is consensual agreement. Human beings may be as implicated intheir knowing as you please; science asks only that they be implicated generically rather thanidiosyncratically—that they be implicated as physicists, say, rather than as Joneses or Smiths.

2. Second Objection: So much for the first objection, that science is not as I have depicted it.The second objection accepts my account as applicable for today’s science but not necessarily fortomorrow’s.

Answer: Obviously science will change in many respects, but will its changes enable it to dealwith the values, purposes, meanings, and qualities it has thus far neglected? (The change fromclassical to relativity physics was momentous, but it changed nothing in physics’ stance toward thefour lacunae I keep citing.) If science is to deal with these lacunae, it will have to relax the demandsfor objectivity, prediction, control, and number that have excluded it from qualitative domains whilegenerating its power in quantitative ones. We are free, of course, to turn science in this new direction,a direction that is actually old in that it points back to the preseventeenth-century, partly alchemicalnotion of what science should be. What we must realize is that every step taken toward humanizingscience in the sense of moving it into the four fields it has thus far ignored will be a step away fromits effectiveness in the sense of its power-to-control. For it is precisely from the narrowness of itsapproach that the power of modern science derives. An effective and restricted science or one that isample but does not enable us to control the course of events much more than do art, religion, orpsychotherapy—we can of course define the word as we wish. What is not possible is to have it bothways.

As the issue of the journal for which this essay was originally written focused on values thatinclude religion, this section on science should perhaps be rounded off by noting that the stress I placeon the differences between science and religion runs counter to the prevailing trend, which is toaccent their similarities, a trend that has led theologians to honor Teilhard de Chardin, MichaelPolanyi, and Thomas Kuhn (for all their merits) perhaps excessively. I think this bedfellows approachholds dangers. We see, I think, what prompts the approach. If it can be shown that science resemblesreligion, perhaps the credibility of the first will rub off onto the second. The kicker, however, is this:the similarities that are being made so much of in the current science/religion discussions concernperson (the scientist who does science), method (how science is done), or application (the uses towhich science is put), none of which, taken individually or even collectively, rival in importance afourth issue, namely, the kind of knowledge science seeks. Science has advanced to the unrivaledrespect it now enjoys by virtue of the kind of knowledge it has discovered and the control to whichsuch knowledge lends itself. It is with reference to this kind of knowledge, therefore, that it deservesto be defined and by our society will be defined—alternative proposals by theologians orphilosophers are not going to change this. The result is that any credibility rub-off from science ontoreligion that may derive from associating the two will be outweighed by the pull to conform religioustruth to scientific: the more religion is linked with top-dog science, the greater will be the expectationthat its truth conform to the top dog’s successful mold. The process is subtle but very strong. It is at

work in the academic study of religion where objectivity has already become an almost undisputednorm.13

III. The Traditional, and in Effect Primordial, Outlook

I hope that the preceding section has not cast scientists in the role of white-coated bad guys. I do notknow if science has brought more harm or good even to date, much less what the long-term balancewill show. Pointing fingers nowhere save at ourselves—as denizens of the modern world in general(and even here there is no finger pointing really; we would have had to have been prescient demigodsfor what has happened not to have happened)—I am occupied with a single phenomenon, quite asimple one really. When attention turns toward something it turns away from something else. Thetriumphs of modern science—all in the material world, it should not be forgotten—have swung ourattention toward the world’s material aspects. The consequence—could anything be more natural?—has been progressive inattention to certain of the world’s other properties. Stop attending tosomething and first we forget its importance and from there it is only a matter of time till one beginsto wonder if it exists at all.14 But let me invoke another voice to make my point more graphically.

In his posthumous A Guide for the Perplexed, a book that appeared a year after Forgotten Truthand parallels it to the point that it can be read as the same book for a different audience, E. F. (SmallIs Beautiful) Schumacher tells of being lost while sightseeing in St. Petersburg, Russia, then calledLeningrad. He was consulting his pocket map when an interpreter stepped up and offered to help.When he pointed on the map to where they were standing, Schumacher was puzzled. “But these largechurches around us, they aren’t on the map,” he protested. “We don’t show churches on our maps,”was the blunt retort. “But that’s not so,” Schumacher persisted. “That church over there—it is on themap.” “Oh, that,” the guide responded. “That’s no longer a church. It’s a museum.” 15

Comparably, Schumacher goes on to say, with the philosophical map his Oxford educationprovided him: Most of the things that most of humanity has considered most important throughout itshistory didn’t show on it. Or if they did, they showed as museum pieces—things people used tobelieve about the world but believe no longer.

The anecdote provides an ideal entrée to the traditional worldview in suggesting modernityomits something—as the title of my just cited book puts the matter, it has forgotten something. Thissomething, which constitutes the ontological divide that separates tradition and modernity, is higherrealms of being—domains of existence that begin precisely where science stops. “Higher” functionsmetaphorically here, of course—the additional realms are not spatially removed. But if we discountthis literal, spatial sense of higher, they are superior in every (other) way. They are more important.They exert more power. They are less ephemeral. They are more integrated. They are more sentientand therefore more beneficent. And they enjoy more felicity, a felicity that in the highest octavesphases into beatitude. Ontologists fuse these various facets of worth by saying that the higher regionshave more being. They are more real.

If the reader finds such notions incredible, his response is completely understandable; the truth Ihave come to think they represent would not be forgotten, again as in Forgotten Truth, if they pressedthe “of course” button within us. Theodore Roszak voices the typical incredulity of today’sintellectual toward the primordial vision when, in reviewing the Schumacher book just alluded to, he

writes: “It does no good at all to quote [Aristotle, Dante, and Thomas Aquinas], to celebrate theirinsight, to adulate their wisdom. Of course they are wise and fine and noble, but they stand on theother side of the abyss” (Los Angeles Times, 11 September 1977). But capacity to believe (ordisbelieve) has never been a reliable index of whether the belief in question is true; innumerablesocial, historical, and psychological factors affect what people are able to believe. I do not argue thatthe primordial vision continues today to seem self-evident or even (to our practical, workadaysensibilities) plausible. What has escaped me, if it is around, is anything modernity has discoveredthat shows it to be mistaken. In searching for negative evidence, I naturally turned first to science,only to find that when its discoveries are freed of interpretations the facts themselves do not require,they slip into the folds of tradition without a ripple. Only when negativism intrudes and the successesof science are wittingly (as in positivism) or unwittingly (as in modernity generally) used to erodeconfidence in realities other than those science can handle—when, in a phrase, science phases intoscientism—does opposition appear. Tradition (a word I try never to pronounce with contempt)incorporates science, whereas scientism excludes tradition by fiat. The fact that tradition has the moregenerous, inclusive purview stands for me as at least an initial count in its favor.

Were I to say in detail what the higher reaches of reality are, there would be no room to suggestbefore I close some possibilities they hold for education. So, accenting their primordial, near-universal character, I shall summarize what was said in the preceding chapter. In addition to practicallife, which is grounded in (a) the material or terrestrial plane, every known culture has allowed aplace for religion, which, to accommodate important differences in spiritual personality types,proceeds on three levels: folk religion, theism, and mysticism. Folk religion is involved with whatPlato calls (b) the intermediate plane (to metaxy); theism with (c) the celestial plane (WilhelmSchmidt’s “High God” a supreme divinity manifesting personal attributes, classical theism), andmysticism with (d) the Infinite-God in his ineffable mode: the Tao that cannot be spoken, nirvana,sunyata, and Godhead. “The Great Truth about the world’ as Schumacher says, “is that it is ahierarchic structure of four great ‘Levels of Being.’”16To amplify only slightly:

1. The matrices of the terrestrial plane are space, time, and matter. Science seems to havedeveloped nearly ideal procedures for understanding it. We are so into the scientific way of seeingthings that we tend to think of this physical stratum as foundational; we assume that it could existwithout the others, but not vice versa. In point of fact, however, from our human point of view, matter(primary qualities, “vacuous actuality”) is far from our starting point—it is with experience, notmatter, that we begin. Phenomenology has come forward to make this point painstakingly and, ascounterpoise to the reductionism that results when we forget it, is an important movement.

2. Human life is so obviously soma and psyche, body and mind, that the terrestrial andintermediate planes are usually best considered together. Nevertheless, the intermediate plane doescontain ingredients that exceed its manifestly human ones that phenomenology attends to. Theseadditional populations have the looks of a hodgepodge, a grab bag—they constitute the world of tarotcards, tea leaves, and premonitions, as someone has characterized it. The animate denizens of thisworld are gods, ghosts, and demons; the “little people” of various description; the “controls” ofspiritualists, mediums, and amanuenses; departed souls in limbo, purgatory, and the Tibetan bardos—in a phrase, discamates generally. Some of these are so suspect that I am embarrassed even to mention

them, but one man’s mush is another man’s meaning, so in view of the difficulty of producing reliablecriteria for sorting out what has at least some factual basis, it is best at this point to be egalitarian. Somuch nonsense goes on in the name of this intermediate or psychic plane that it takes courage to say,as did anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, that something does go on. The couragecan be less if we depersonalize the contents of the intermediate plane, for as we have now come toassume that the universe that wraps us round is by and large impersonal, it is easier for us tocountenance forces or entities that fit this description. Regarded as impersonal, the contents of theintermediate plane turn up as psi phenomena of parapsychology, “coincidences” (as in ArthurKoestler’s The Roots of Coincidence), Jungian archetypes, and astral influences—again, muchwinnowing is needed to separate the wheat from the chaff. Dreams seem to have some sort ofprivileged access to this plane, and Theodore Roszak’s Unfinished Animal is lush witness thatinterest in it is not confined to traditional cultures or unsophisticated minds in ours. A leading analyticphilosopher recently observed that whereas Freudianism has a marvelous theory but no facts,parapsychology has facts but no theory. The second half of his statement holds pretty much for theintermediate plane generally. Enigmatic energies of some kind seem to be at work, but, as we havenoted, it is the very mischief to verify them or identify what they are. And let me repeat that it isusually best to think of the terrestrial and intermediate planes together, for on the one hand theterrestrial cries out for infusion from the intermediate to account for the difference between life andnonlife, while the intermediate for its part resembles the terrestrial in being a maelstrom of forces thatthreaten as much as they sustain us.

3. Impersonally, the celestial plane consists in Western idiom of the Platonic archetypes asintegrated in the Idea of the Good. Personally, as we have said, it is the God of classical theism.

4. The Infinite is everything, integrated to the unimaginable point of excluding separations. It canbe intuited, but words can depict it only paradoxically, for univocal assertions (being definite)necessarily exclude something, which the Infinite (by definition) cannot.

It bears repeating that the higher planes are not more abstract. Quite the contrary, each ascendingplane, in addition to being incredibly vaster, is more concrete, more real, than the ones below. Onlyon superior levels are the contents of lower levels revisioned to make the way they first appearedseem, like dreams on awakening, relatively unreal. This last phrase, “relatively unreal,” should beglossed to read, “not totally unreal, but requiring revision from the way they appear on planes that aremore restricted.”

The disappearance of the higher planes of reality from our contemporary philosophical maps—or, to speak more carefully, the decline in our confidence in such planes—is, as I say, the change thatseparates modernity from tradition most decisively.17 In common parlance, our outlook has becomemore this-worldly, “this world” being the one that connects with our senses. And it is clear from whatI have said that I think the change has impoverished our sense of what the world includes and what itmeans to be fully human—in giving “ultimate authority to the worldview of a slightly sleepybusinessman right after lunch,” to invoke G. K. Chesterton’s wry formulation, we have lost our gripon the innate immensity of our true nature.18 It stands to reason that a new ethos has emerged to fit thisreduced onto-anthropology, and before I turn to saying a thing or two about education, I need to dub inthat ethos. My sketch holds, I think, for our culture as a whole, but especially for today’s university.

IV. The Ethos of the Modern West

The most pertinent way to characterize the modern ethos briefly is to say that it is a blend ofnaturalism and control. The two terms are related, for it is our wish to control that has brought ournaturalism. By way of a new epistemology, we can add, so we actually have three things going: ourwill to power, its attendant epistemology, and the metaphysics this epistemology brings in its train.

1. Promethean MotivationCan anyone doubt that science has enlarged man’s power incalculably,19 or that this is the primaryreason we are so invested in it? Life by its very nature is beset with problems, and problems cry outto be solved. Since science, via technology, is the most effective problem solver we have invented, itis natural that in trying to solve the problems that beset us we have come to look increasingly inscience’s direction.

This much seems clear. What we are only beginning to see is that Prometheanism breeds adistinctive epistemology.

2. Promethean EpistemologyLet me introduce Ernest Gellner here, for as a philosopher-sociologist who brings his sociologicalequipment to bear on analyzing philosophy, his conclusions are more than personal opinions; theyclaim, at least, to report on the conditions of philosophy in general. In his Legitimation of Belief, hetells us that underlying the seeming variety—chaos, even—of twentieth-century philosophy, an“emerging consensus” can be discerned. Having for some time accepted that epistemology isphilosophy’s current central task, philosophers are now coming to agree, broadly speaking, that to berecognized as legitimate, beliefs must pass certain tests. “There is the empiricist insistence thatfaiths…must stand ready to be judged by…something reasonably close to the ordinary notion of‘experience.’ Second, there is the ‘mechanistic’ insistence on impersonal…explanations.” 20

Without dropping a word, Gellner proceeds to acknowledge that it is our Prometheanism that hasestablished this twofold requirement:

We have of course no guarantee that the world must be such as to be amenable to such explanations; we can only show thatwe are constrained to think so. It was Kant’s merit to see that this compulsion is in us, not in things. It was Weber’s to seethat it is historically a specific kind of mind, not human mind as such, which is subject to this compulsion. What it amounts tois in the end simple: if there is to be effective knowledge or explanation at all, it must have this form, for any other kind of“explanation”…is ipso facto powerless.

We have become habituated to and dependent on effective knowledge, and hence have bound ourselves to this kind ofgenuine explanation.…“Reductionism,” the view that everything in the world is really something else, and that that somethingelse is coldly impersonal, is simply the ineluctable corollary of effective explanation.21

Gellner admits that this epistemology our Prometheanism has forced upon us carries “morallydisturbing” consequences:

It was also Kant’s merit to see the inescapable price of this Faustian purchase of real [sic] knowledge. [In delivering]cognitive effectiveness [it] exacts its inherent moral, “dehumanizing” price.…The price of real knowledge is that ouridentities, freedom, norms, are no longer underwritten by our vision and comprehension of things.22 On the contrary we aredoomed to suffer from a tension between cognition and identity.23

Even so, Gellner concludes, we must accept this tension, for the only alternative to “effectiveknowledge” is “meretricious styles of thought” aimed at “restoration of the moral order within a cozyworld in which identities and moral norms were linked in a closed circle of definitions.”

3. Naturalistic MetaphysicsGiven the way Promethean reason imposes itself on the objects it works with, the world it presents tous can be viewed as the product of a vast display of ventriloquism in which the so-called externalworld is a dummy; if this comparison leans too far in the direction of science-as-construct, it at leastgets us past the simplistic model of the archeologist who discovers through straightforward acts ofuncovering. Empiricism and mechanism being ill suited to deal with transcendence and the unseen,the epistemology of Prometheanism necessarily conjures for us a naturalistic world. Hannah Arendf’spoint about this was touched on in the endnote for p. 22 and is important enough to be stated in fullhere. “What has come to an end is the…distinction between the sensual and the supersensual, togetherwith the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses…is more real,more truthful, more meaningful than what appears; that it is not just beyond sense perception butabove the world of the senses.” 24 Emphasizing that “what is ‘dead’ is not only the localizationof…‘eternal truths, but the [temporal/eteral, sensual/supersensual] distinction itself” ’ she proceeds topoint out the consequences.

In increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in thisdevelopment; and although they themselves seldom invoke it, they have an important argument in their favor: it is indeed truethat once the supersensual realm is discarded, its opposite, the world of appearances as understood for so many centuries, isalso annihilated. The sensual, as still understood by the positivists, cannot survive the death of the supersensual. No one knewthis better than Nietzsche who, with his poetic and metaphoric description of the assassination of God in Zarathustra, hascaused so much confusion in these matters. In a significant passage in The Twilight of Idols, he clarifies what the word Godmeant in Zarathustra. It was merely a symbol for the supersensual realm as understood by metaphysics; he now usesinstead of God the word true world and says: “We have abolished the true world. What has remained? The apparent oneperhaps? Oh no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.”25

V. Import for Education

Education has so much to learn. It needs to learn, needs to see, what is happening to it, and what itshould do in the face of this happening.

What is happening to it is that it is being pressed increasingly into the service of the kind ofknowing that facilitates control. Inasmuch as our will-to-control has cut our consciousness to fit itsneeds—tailored our awareness to fit its imperatives—our educational attempts naturally conform tothis tailoring. I shall not attempt to document this assertion systematically—only to note a few strawsin the wind.

PhilosophyThe place where philosophy intersects science is, of course, logic, and the growth of logical concernin twentieth-century philosophy has been dramatic. It is going too far to suggest, as someone recentlyhas, that philosophy departments have in effect now become departments of applied logic, but thetrend to “do philosophy” via the formal arguments of symbolic logic is unmistakable. Even in the

philosophy of language, Chomsky’s mildly metaphysical (Cartesian) interests have been overtaken byDonald Davidson’s efforts to apply symbolic logic to natural languages. The other side of the coin is,of course, the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of philosophy’s retreat from metaphysics; whereworldviews cannot be avoided entirely, the species that is usually admitted is a brand of mechanism,materialism, or empiricism—a recent New York Times report refers to “the materialism that isoverwhelmingly predominant in current analytic philosophy.” 26 Yet neither Quine nor Kripkethesenior and junior “Mr. Logics” of recent times—thinks that empiricism or materialism are themselvesempirically grounded.27 They have been instated—I am speaking for myself now—because they arethe premises that support most forthrightly the kind of knowledge that facilitates control.28

Economics“Contemporary economics thinks of itself as a science, heavily quantitative, using mathematics andstatistics as its vocabulary. Paul Samuelson and Wassily Leontief still remain its giants.” 29 In SmallIs Beautiful, E. F. Schumacher contends that its quantitative orientation has become so excessive, sototally devoid of qualitative understanding, that even the quality of “orders of magnitude” ceases to beappreciated.

Political Science“The profound option of mainstream social scientists for the empiricist conception of knowledge andscience makes it inevitable that they should accept the verification model of political science,’’Charles Taylor, then Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University, tells us. “Thebasic premise [of this approach is] that social reality is made up of brute data alone” ’ data that isobjective in requiring no interpretation and being in principle recordable by machines. Theconsequence, Professor Taylor concludes, is that a ‘whole level of study of our civilization…is ruledout. Rather [it] is made invisible.”30

HistoryA member of the external examining committee that was appointed to review the graduate historyprogram at my university happened to belong to the new breed of quantitative historians. At one pointin the committee’s deliberations, he was reported to have said, “If you can’t count it, you might aswell be playing football.” Granted that his statement was extreme, it says something about our timesthat a responsible academic could have said it at all.

Anthropology“English-speaking anthropology over the last half century has been and continues to be passionatelyscientistic in its hopes and claims, and methods. One consequence—and it shares this trait with othersciences—is a built-in positivism and an aversion to history, both general and its own.” 31

PsychologyInsofar as there is a model of humanity in academic psychology, it is still basically Freudian, and“classical psychoanalytic theory is based quite explicitly on a specific, highly materialist view ofman’s nature.”32

The Social Sciences GenerallyCharles Taylor generalizes the point we quoted him as making about political science as follows:

The progress of natural science has lent great credibility to [verificationist] epistemology, so of course, the temptation hasbeen overwhelming to reconstruct the sciences of man on the same model; or rather to launch them in lines of inquiry that fitthis paradigm, since they are constantly said to be in their “infancy.” Psychology, where an earlier vogue of behaviorism isbeing replaced by a boom of computer-based models, is far from the only case.33

May Brodbeck notes that there are

two factors within the social disciplines. One of them exuberantly embraces the scientific idea; the other [introducing thedistinction between Verstehen and explanation], exalts its own intuitive understanding as being superior in logic and inprinciple to scientific explanation,34

but Thomas Lawson of Western Michigan University says that recent scholarly critiques of thenonscientific faction have “been so powerful and penetrating that [it is] bankrupt.” 35 This seems tojustify the following overview in the September 1978 issue of The Atlantic Monthly:

The social sciences are, or aspire to be, sciences; they have a scientific methodology.…The majority of social sciences haveadopted a form of radical empiricism. According to this doctrine, the only sentences that are scientifically acceptable arethose that are directly verifiable by experiment.…

This methodology was borrowed from the teachings of the logical positivists.…Logical positivism was given up long agoby most scientists and philosophers, including many of the positivists themselves. Yet this positivistic doctrine…has taken firmroot in the social sciences. It has done so because it provides a simple (if oversimple) distinction between fact and valuewhich allows social scientists to make the (sometimes bogus) claim of scientific objectivity.36

The ArtsI shall let the poet Kathleen Raine describe the situation here.

Poets of the imagination write of the soul, of intellectual beauty, of the living spirit of the world. What does such workcommunicate to readers who do not believe in the soul, in the spirit of life, or in anything that can be (unless the physicallydesirable) called “the beautiful”? For in René Guénon’s “reign of quantity” such terms of quality become…“meaningless,”because there is nothing for which they stand.…

What can be saved from a culture whose premises are of a spiritual order in an iron age peopled by Plato’s “men ofclay” (the human primate of the scientist) is the quantifiable; the mechanics of construction, in whatever art. And theengineering element in the making of a poem is negligible in comparison with that of the most impressive and typical work ofthe reign of quantity, the space-ship. What meaning is there, in materialist terms, to the word “poet”; or the essence—the“poetry”—and the quality—the “poetic”—of works of art?37

GeographyI save for last a field that shows some signs of a turning tide. Following World War II, geography’sclassic concern with place lost ground to a more abstract, geometric concern for space; a recent issueof the Canadian Geographer refers to “a generation of geographical treatment of the man-environment relationship as a measurable, objective, and mechanistic entity which may be examinedthrough concepts and methods derived from the natural sciences.” It goes on, however, to place the“high tide of [this] scientific geography” around 1960. Later geographers have shown signs of “afundamental dissatisfaction with positivist philosophies of social science and the perceivedimplications of such study for our social and geographical world.’’38 The empiricist school must

probably still be reckoned the dominant one, but in this field, there seem to be signs of a “rise of soulagainst intellect, as Yeats would put the matter.39

I have mentioned only a handful of disciplines, and even in these have done little more thanreport some straws in the winds that have blown my way since I started to think about this essay. Ifthey add up to no more than a straw man, there may be no problem. But if they are accurate insuggesting that the academic mind continues to lean excessively toward the scientific model, what isto be done?

If it is true, as I have argued:

first, that the exceptional power-to-control that modern science has made possible has made us reach out insistently, perhapseven desperately if we feel we are on a treadmill, for ever-increasing control;

second, that this outreach has forged a new epistemology wherein knowledge that facilitates control and the devices forgetting at such knowledge are honored to the neglect of their alternatives;

and third, that this utilitarian epistemology has constricted our view of the way things are, including what it means to be fullyhuman;

if, as I say, these contentions are essentially accurate, it behooves us to decide if we want to changeour direction, and if so, what a better direction might be.

On the first question, it is obvious from the tenor of this entire essay that I think we can do betterthan continue down our present path. The main reason I would prefer an alternative is that I think thatwith respect to things that matter most, our present course is taking us away from truth more thantoward it, but there is a supporting reason. There are reports that life in the cave we have entereddoes not feel very good. As I do not trust my own intuitions here—they could easily be self-serving—I shall let a professional student of society, a sociologist named Manfred Stanley, make the point.

It is by now a Sunday-supplement commonplace that the social, economic and technological modernization of the world isaccompanied by a spiritual malaise that has come to be called alienation. At its most fundamental level, the diagnosis ofalienation is based on the view that modernization forces upon us a world that, although baptized as real by science, isdenuded of all humanly recognizable qualities; beauty and ugliness, love and hate, passion and fulfillment, salvation anddamnation. It is not, of course, being claimed that such matters are not part of the existential realities of human life. It israther that the scientific worldview makes it illegitimate to speak of them as being “objectively” part of the world, forcing usinstead to define such evaluation and such emotional experience as “merely subjective” projections of people’s inner lives.

The world, once an “enchanted garden,” to use Max Weber’s memorable phrase, has now become disenchanted,deprived of purpose and direction, bereft—in these senses—of life itself. All that which is allegedly basic to the specificallyhuman status in nature, comes to be forced back upon the precincts of the “subjective” which, in turn, is pushed by themodern scientific view ever more into the province of dreams and illusions.40

If we have trimmed our epistemological sails too close to the scientific desiderata of objectivity,prediction, number, and control (as per the diagram on p. 83), and it is this that has constricted ourworldview and brought alienation, it seems only sensible to consider alternative guidelines—perhapseven opposite ones to get the matter in sharp relief. The alternatives to objectivity, prediction,control, and number are subjectivity, surprise, surrender, and words. With the exception of the last ofthese four terms, it sounds odd even to suggest that education might turn toward them. This shows howdeeply committed we are to the scientific quartet, but the question is, are we too deeply implicatedwith it even to imagine what an education that swung toward the neglected alternatives would looklike?

VI. Pump-Priming for a Different Educational Model

Subjective education would recognize that it is as important to understand oneself as it is tounderstand one’s world and its parts. It would distinguish between objective and subjective (orexistential) truths, the latter being defined as truths we acknowledge not only with our minds but withour lives as well—we live as if we really do believe that they are true. And it would argue that“truth” deserves the prefix “subjective” as much as the prefix “objective.”

Education for surprise would begin with, and keep always in full view, its indisputablepremise: in comparison with what we do not know, what we do know is nothing. Balancing ourpresent assumption that education’s role is to transmit what we know, education for surprise wouldnot reject that premise but would add that it is equally important to remember how much we do notknow. Learning theory? Who knows, really, how we learn? Medicine? I go to visit my erstwhileneighbor Robert Becker at New York’s Upstate Medical Center because of interesting things I haveheard about his research and he greets me with, “We know nothing!” “Welcome to the club,” I reply,having studied the skeptical tradition in Western philosophy rather thoroughly. “That’s not what Imean,” he says. “It may be true generally, but it’s especially true in medicine. Here I am, a director ofmedical research with thirty years behind me, and when I cut my face shaving I haven’t any idea whatmakes it heal.” Generalizing Becker’s point, education for surprise would remind students that themore we know, the more we see how much we do not know—the larger the island of knowledge, thelonger the shoreline of wonder. Noting that neither language nor science is rule-directed in the senseof proceeding by the application of rules we can discern and explicitly state, it would pay specialattention to case studies where the long shot carried the day. It might even try to hone students’sensibilities to surprise by asking questions like, “Did anything surprise you yesterday?” On theflyleaves of the training manuals for such education, we might paste this statement, titled “TheStrangest Age,” from Newsweek, 25 July 1977:

Perhaps ours is the strangest age. It is an age without a sense of the strangeness of things.…The human race has grown up and lost its capacity for wonder. This is not because people understand their everyday

world better than people did in earlier ages. Today people understand less and less of the social and scientific systems onwhich they depend more and more. Alas, growing up usually means growing immune to astonishment. As G. K. Chestertonwrote, very young children do not need fairy tales because “mere life is interesting enough. A child of 7 is excited by beingtold that Tommy opened the door and saw a dragon. But a child of 3 is excited by being told that Tommy opened the door.”The 3-year-old is the realist. No one really knows how Tommy does it.

Education for surrender sounds strangest of all, not only because of the military associations ofthat word but because it runs counter to the penchant that has created our modern world. Recognizingthat it would be working against some of our strongest social instincts, such education would remindus that life proceeds by breathing out and in, giving and receiving, doing and being, left hemisphereand right, yang and yin. Moreover, too much imbalance between the poles can make life capsize. Itwould show that only in the realm of things—the realm I have called the terrestrial plane—arefreedom (and the control to which it can be put) attractive even as ideals; the last thing a man in lovewants to hear from his beloved is that he is free, while to enter a friendship or marriage with intent tocontrol is to sully it from the start. In life’s higher reaches, freedom and the will-to-power aresymptoms of detachment in its pathological sense of inability to cathect. To be unable to give oneself—to a person, a cause, the call of conscience, God, something—is to lack a capacity that is integral to

being fully human. It is to be incapable of commitment. Kurt Wolff says that “the seminal meaning of‘surrender’ is ‘cognitive love,’” and notes certain other meanings that “follow from it: totalinvolvement, suspension of received notions, pertinence of everything, identification, and risk ofbeing hurt.” 41 Heidegger’s continuing influence on our campuses in the face of his tortuous languageand unpopular premises derives in part, at least, from the sense that there is something inherently rightin the Gelassenheit toward which his philosophy points. Someone has translated Gelassenheit as“reverent, choiceless letting-be of what is in order that it may reveal itself in the essence of itsbeing.”

Reading, writing, and arithmetic: Education is always involved with words, but in opposingthem to numbers I am focusing on one of its specific features. Words are symbols, whereas numbersare only signs.42 Because signs are univocal, they can lock together in logics that compel assent, butthis cannot be said of symbols, which are multivalent in principle. Their inbuilt ambiguity makeslogicians flee them for univocal signs,43 but humanists prize their equivocality. A biologist has statedtheir case succinctly:

Ambiguity seems to be an essential, indispensable element for the transfer of information from one place to another by words,where matters of real importance are concerned. It is often necessary, for meaning to come through, that there be an almostvague sense of strangeness and askewness. Speechless animals and cells cannot do this. Only the human mind is designed towork in this way, programmed to drift away in the presence of locked-on information, straying from each point in a hunt for abetter, different point.44

Language is biological in that we are programmed to learn it, Lewis Thomas concludes, but it ispeculiar in being a “programming for ambiguity.” An education-for-words that is alert to theirsymbolic virtues would teach that the need to be clear must not be allowed to sterilize language—ridit of the humus of adumbration and allusion that makes it fertile and capable of reaching into everycrevice of the human soul. The point is crucial for dilating our sense of the world. We cannot go backto very old civilizations where words virtually doubled for things by borrowing their full substance,but there is no reason why we cannot come again to see that at its best, symbolism is the “science” ofthe relationship between alternate levels of reality (al-Ghazali).

The foregoing has deduced the outlines of an alternative education by reversing the criteria ofscientific knowing. I might have gotten to much the same place if I had asked what education wouldlook like if it attended more to the things science is not skillful with: intrinsic and normative values,purposes, existential and inclusive meanings, and qualities. But I have said enough for today, save fora quick coda.

I hope what I have written has not contributed to the literature of indictment. I have tried merelyto ask myself where we are and where it might be good to go. The second half of this question,“Where might it be good to go,” does not, I think, implicate me in the homilist’s complaint of living inbad times, but it does bring my argument full circle in a way I had not anticipated. Going is a mode ofdoing, and doing includes an element of control. But the will-to-control, having caused our narrowedepistemology and ontology, is what we need to correct—this has been my argument.

The paradox—recommendations issuing from one side of a mouth that preaches wu wei(nonwillfullness, noninsistence) with its other side—could be embarrassing were it not in fact avirtue. For it shows that at least we have not been wrestling with a straw man. If motivations(intentions) do breed their respective epistemologies and worlds and it has been our historical

destiny to push the problem-solving triumvirate to dangerous extremes, the question remains: what isthe right balance between participation and control? I do not know the answer. If I were a universitypresident forced to divide short funds between knowledge that furthers participation and knowledgethat furthers control, I would agonize. Everything I have written is premised on the intuition that weare top-heavy on control, but those who disagree are powerful and worthy of the utmost respect andeven fear, so much so that I shall ask Gregory Bateson to address to them my final rejoinder. Hisstatement appeared in an interview with Daniel Goleman in Psychology Today.

GOLEMAN: What’s to be done?BATESON: Funny question, “What’s to be done?” Suppose I said that nothing’s to be done. Way

back in 1947, I was asked to address a group of physicists at Princeton. They had all worked on theatom bomb, and then were terribly remorseful about what might be done with it. Robert Oppenheimerhad organized a seminar for these nuclear physicists to examine the social sciences to see if therewere any remedies. After my talk, I was Oppenheimer’s houseguest. The next morning was a horrible,rainy winter day. The children had lost their rubbers and Mrs. Oppenheimer was going mad trying toget them off to school. The regular American breakfast scene.

And in the midst of all this hubbub, out of the blue, came the still, small voice of Oppenheimer,saying, unasked, “You know, if anyone asked me why I left teaching at Cal Tech and came to doresearch at Princeton, I suppose the answer was that at Cal Tech there were 500 students to face, whoall wanted to know the answers.”

I said, “I suppose the answers to these questions would have been rather bitter.”Oppenheimer said, “Well, as I see it, the world is moving in the direction of hell, with a high

velocity, and perhaps a positive acceleration, and a positive rate of change of acceleration; and theonly condition under which it might not reach its destination is that we and the Russians be willing tolet it go there.” Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it. The old deterrencetheory. We arm up to control the Russians, they do the same. Anxiety, in fact, brings about the thing itfears, creates its own disaster.

GOLEMAN: So, just let it happen?BATESON: Well, be bloody careful about the politics you play to control it. You don’t know the

total pattern; for all you know, you could create the next horror by trying to fix up a present one.GOLEMAN: The patterns you talk about in which we are enmeshed seem much larger than we

can grasp.BATESON: There is a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger

mind is perhaps what some people mean by “God.” But it is immanent in the total interconnectedsocial system and includes the planetary ecology.

GOLEMAN: It seems to be almost futile to try to perceive, let alone control, this larger web ofpatterns and connections.

BATESON: Trying to perceive them is, I’m sure, worthwhile. I’ve devoted my life to thatproposition. Trying to tell other people about them is worthwhile. In a sense, we know it already. Atthe same time, we don’t know. We are terribly full of screaming voices that talk administrative“common sense.”

GOLEMAN: Rather than.…

BATESON: Wisdom. If there be such a thing.45

* Huston Smith, The Purposes of Higher Education (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955). “Chanced” is the exact word here, for thebook almost did not get written. Had I not run into a professor of speech who said he had been meaning to tell me that he was using acommittee report I had written in his choral reading class, that report would have remained buried in my files until discarded. As it was,the idea of a committee report being intoned as art was so bizarre that I unearthed the document and reread it. It was the report of acommittee that had been appointed to define the aims of liberal education at the university where I was then teaching (WashingtonUniversity, St. Louis), and finding that it did read passably, I dispatched it to a publisher. The reply was back in a week. The contents hadto be expanded tenfold, but a contract was enclosed.# I almost wrote “born teacher,” for when my father built his children a workshop I lost no time in converting it into a schoolroom. Toolswere shelved, benches brought in, and my younger brother and the servants' children—we were in China—impressed for pupils. And I?I assumed the podium as if authorized by the Mandate of Heaven, if not the Tao itself. The sensation has never left me. Imprinting is tooweak. It is enough to make one consider reincarnation.

5

The Humanities:Flakes of Fire, Handfuls of Light

This essay continues the theme of the preceding one and relates it specifically to the humanities. Itwas originally delivered as an address that formed a part of the week-long festival, “In Celebrationof the Humanities,” that marked the move of Syracuse University’s humanities division into newquarters in the autumn of 1979.

Those of us who saw “Einstein’s Universe,” that remarkable television program the BritishBroadcasting Company created for the centennial of Einstein’s birth, remember the words that laced itlike a theme: “Einstein would have wanted us to say it in the simplest possible way. Space tellsmatter how to move; matter tells space how to warp.”

How, in the simplest possible way, can we describe the burden and promise of the humanitiestoday?

I. The Humanities

First, by identifying their central concern. They have many facets, of course, but we will not be farfrom the mark if we think of them as custodians of the human image; one way or another, in cycles andepicycles, they circle the question of who we take ourselves to be—what it means to be a humanbeing, to live a human life. We know that self-images are important, for endowed as we are with self-consciousness, we draw portraits of ourselves and then fashion our lives to their likenesses, comingto resemble the portraits we draw. Psychologists who are professionally concerned with behaviormodification tell us that a revised self-image is the most important single factor in human change. It iswhen a person sees himself differently that new ways of behaving come to seem feasible andappropriate.

If then (in company with religion and the arts in our culture at large) the humanities arecustodians of the human self-image, what is their burden and promise today?

II. Burdens: Social and Conceptual

Turning first to their burdens, they are of two kinds, social and conceptual. As the first of these stemsfrom our culture’s institutional forms I shall let a social scientist, a colleague, Manfred Stanley, tellthe story. “It is by now a Sunday-supplement commonplace,” he writes, “that the social, economic andtechnological modernization of the world is accompanied by a spiritual malaise that has come to becalled alienation.”1 (My rationale for repeating this reference to Professor Stanley, which appeared inchapter 4, is given on page xii of the preface as well as in the endnote just cited.) The social changescontributing to this alienation reduce most importantly, I suspect—I am not attributing this furtherpoint to Professor Stanley—to disruption of the primary communities in which life used to be lived.No longer rooted in such communities, our lives are seen less in their entirety, as wholes, by others;and in consequence (so fully are our perceptions of ourselves governed by others’ perceptions of us)we have difficulty seeing ourselves as wholes. High mobility decrees that our associates know onlylimited time segments of our lives—childhood, college, mid-life career, retirement—while thecompartmentalization of industrial life insures that at any given life stage our associates will know usin only one of our roles; worker, family member, civic associate, or friend. None of them know us inthe round, so to speak, and as they do not so know us, we have trouble seeing ourselves as wholes aswell.

This scattering of our lives in time and their splintering in space tends to fragment our self-imageand, in extreme cases, to pulverize it. Engendering Robert Lifton’s “protean man” and abetting theexistentialist’s conclusion that we have no essence, the disruption of the primary community is, as Isay, the heaviest burden I see institutional changes laying on our efforts to see ourselves as completepersons.

The conceptual problem our age has wrought, however, is (if anything) even weightier. By thisconceptual problem I mean the worldview the modern West has settled into: its notion of “the schemeof things entire” as it finally is. The statement by Professor Stanley that I began quoting twoparagraphs above speaks to this conceptual side of our predicament, too, so let me continue to let himspeak for me. He was noting the alienation that modernization has occasioned, and after alluding tosome of its social causes, he drives straight to the heart of the matter.

At its most fundamental level, the diagnosis of alienation is based on the view that modernization forces upon us a world that,although baptized as real by science, is denuded of all humanly recognizable qualities; beauty and ugliness, love and hate,passion and fulfillment, salvation and damnation. It is not, of course, being claimed that such matters are not part of theexistential realities of human life. It is rather that the scientific worldview makes it illegitimate to speak of them as being“objectively” part of the world, forcing us instead to define such evaluation and such emotional experience as “merelysubjective” projections of people’s inner lives.

The world, once an “enchanted garden,” to use Max Weber’s memorable phrase, has now become disenchanted,deprived of purpose and direction, bereft—in these senses—of life itself. All that which is allegedly basic to the specificallyhuman status in nature comes to be forced back upon the precincts of the “subjective” which, in turn, is pushed by themodern scientific view ever more into the province of dreams and illusions.2

To say that it is difficult—burdensome—to maintain a respectable human image in a world likethis is an understatement. The truth is, it is impossible.3 If modern man feels alienated from this worldhe sees enveloping him, it shows that his wits are still intact. He should feel alienated. For nopermanent standoff between self and world is possible; eventually, there will be a showdown. Andwhen it comes, there is no doubt about the outcome: the world will win—for a starter, it is biggerthan we are. So a meaningful life is not finally possible in a meaningless world. It is provisionally

possible—there can be a temporary standoff between self and world—but finally it is not possible.4

Either the garden is indeed disenchanted, in which case the humanities deserve to be on the defensive,no noble image being possible in an a-noble—I do not say ignoble—world; or the garden remainsenchanted and the humanities should help make this fact known.

To set out to reverse the metaphysical momentum of the last four hundred years might seem a taskso difficult as to be daunting, but there is another way to look at the matter. Here, surely, is somethingworth doing, a project to elicit the best that is within us, including resources we might not know wepossess; even if we fail in the attempt, we shall do so knowing the joy that comes from noble doings.To get the project underway, we must advance into enemy territory—we shall find it to be acontemporary form of what Plato called “upside-down existence”—and to do this we must cross ano-man’s-land of methodology, “no-man’s” being precise here because if either side were to captureit, the victory would be theirs. So, after a short interlude on method to establish the ground rules forthe “war of the worlds” (read “war of the worldviews”), we will be ready to begin.

III. Methodological Interlude

In a university setting, any move to reinstate the enchanted garden can expect to be met by thequestion, “How do you know it is enchanted?” If we answer that we experience it so, that we findourselves ravished by its mystery and washed by its beauty and presences—not always, of course, butenough to sustain conviction5—we shall be told that this is not to know, it is merely to feel. Thiscrude response requires of us a choice. Either we blow the whistle at once on this cramped andpositivistic definition of knowledge (as we shall soon see, its willingness to dignify as knowledgeonly such kinds as hold the promise of augmenting our power-to-control rules out the very possibilityof knowing things that might be superior to us, it being possible to control only subordinates or, atmost, equals; in a word, it rules out the possibility of knowing transcendence) or we can let thisrestriction of knowledge to what-can-be-proved stand. Knowledge then becomes a foundation (oneamong several) for a higher epistemic yield—call it insight, wisdom, understanding, or evenintelligence if we use that word to include, as it did for the Scholastics, Plato’s “eye of the soul” thatcan discern spiritual objects. What we must never, never do is make proof our master. Fear that if wedo not subject ourselves to it we may wander into error will always tempt us to this slavery,6 but toyield to the temptation spells disaster for our discipline. Even physicists, if they be great ones, see (asRichard Feynman pointed out in his Nobel Lecture) that “a very great deal more truth can becomeknown than can be proven.” “Not to prove, but to discover” 7 must be the humanities’ watchword.

To rise above the tyranny of proof and with pounding heart bid farewell to the world of theinadequate—the rope is cut, the bird is free—is in no wise to abandon thoughts for feelings, as ifbogs could accommodate the human spirit better than cages. To relegate the health of our souls to thewhims of our emotions would be absurd. To say that in outdistancing proof we take our minds with usis too weak; they empower our flight. At this higher altitude the mind is, if anything, more alive thanbefore.8 In supreme instances, the muses take over and our minds go on “automatic pilot,” thatinspired, ecstatic state Plato called “the higher madness.” We cannot here track our minds to thoseheights where myth and poetry conspire with revelation and remembrance, science joining them atthose times when hunches strike terror in the heart, so fine is the line between inspired madness and

the kind that disintegrates. Such ozone atmosphere is not for this essay. Ours is the to metaxy, theintermediate realm between proofs that cannot tell us whether the garden is enchanted or not andinspiration that shows us, face to face, that it is. Proofs being unavailable in this “middle kingdom,”there remains the possibility that reasons may have something to say—proofs, no; reasons, yes. Evenhere, we should not expect too much, for the more we try to make our reasons resemble proofs—injustifications or arguments that compel, provided only that the hearer has rational faculties—the morethey must take on proofs’ earthbound character; in grounding them in demonstrations that compel, wewill “ground” them in the correlative sense of preventing them from getting off the ground.

This last point is worth dwelling on for a paragraph, for it points to a dilemma the university iscaught in but does not clearly see. On the one hand, we take it for granted that an important part of ourjob is to train people to think critically; concurrently, we assume that the university is an importantcustodian of civilization: we have the celebrated retort of the Oxford don who, asked what he wasdoing for the Battle of Britain, replied that he was what the fighting was for. What the university doesnot see is that the criteria for critical thinking it has adopted work against the high image of humanitythat keeps civilizations vital. The Aryans who fanned out in the second millenium B.C.E. to spread theIndo-European language base from India to Ireland—Aryurvedic medicine still flourishes in India,and Eyre is simply Aryur spelled differently—called themselves Aryan (noble), while the Muslimswho entered history in the greatest political explosion the world has known were powered for thatexplosion by the Quranic assurance, “Surely We created man in the best stature” (XCV, 4). To cite buta single evidence of the contradiction the university is caught in here, “There is no doubt that indeveloped societies education has contributed to the decline of religious belief”;9 yet students ofevolution tell us that “religious behaviors are…probably adaptive; [their] dialog with ‘nature’…is animportant integrator of [man’s] whole self-view in relation to the world and to activity.” 10 I suspectthat the conjunction of these two facts—religion is adaptive and the canons of modernity erode it—contributed to Max Weber’s pessimism about the future, a pessimism shared by the foremostcontemporary British sociologist of religion, Bryan Wilson. Seeing current society as less legitimatedthan any previous social order, Wilson fears a breakdown of civilizing values in the face of anincreasingly anonymous and rationalized culture.11 I think we should ask ourselves very seriouslywhether the canons of critical thinking the university has drifted into may not be precipitating such apossible breakdown. It has been America’s hope that these canons make for a better, more “rational”world. It seems to be her experience that they do not necessarily do so.

But to proceed. If our first methodological point noted that attempts to force the question of theworld’s worth into the arena of proof preclude a heartening answer by that move alone, the secondpoint concerns an innuendo that must be anticipated and dismissed so discussion can proceed on adecent level. I refer to the charge, more frequently insinuated than openly expressed, that affirmativeworldviews are products of wishful thinking. What are put forward as good reasons to support themare not the real reasons. The real reasons are psychological.

At risk of protesting too much, I propose to raise a small electrical storm here to clear theatmosphere. As barometer to show that the storm is needed, I shall refer (as I have once before; seeendnote for p. 104) to the British philosopher and sociologist Ernest Gellner. In his Legitimation ofBelief he proposes that only such knowledge as lends itself to “public formulation and repeatability”be considered “real knowledge.” He admits that the “moral, ‘dehumanizing’ price” of this move ishigh, for it leads to the conclusion that “our identities, freedom, norms, are no longer underwritten by

our vision and comprehension of things, [so] we are doomed to suffer from a tension betweencognition and identity”—note the enchantment departing from the garden like helium from a puncturedballoon. But we should pay this price manfully, Gellner contends, for its alternative is “styles ofthought [that are] cheap,…cozy [and] meretricious.” It is rhetoric like this that demands a storm todispatch it. Gellner does not argue that the kind of knowledge he baptizes as “real” is in fact so; onlythat “we have become habituated to and dependent on” such knowledge and so “are constrained” todefine knowledge this way. “It was Kant’s merit,” he acknowledges, “to see that this compulsion is inus, not in things. It was Weber’s to see that it is historically a specific kind of mind, not mind as such,which is subject to this compulsion.” 12 But if anyone questions the worth of this compulsion to which“we have become…bound” and proposes to try to loosen its hold on us, he must face, atop thisalready demanding task, Gellner’s insults. For to take exception to his delimitation of “realknowledge” is, to repeat his charge, to engage in “styles of thought [that are] cheap and meretricious.”That last word drove me to my dictionary; I wanted to discover with precision how my mind works.According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is “showily attractive…befitting a harlot.”

I deplore this whole descent into name calling. Unworthy of discussions in a university setting, itleaves a bad taste in my mouth; part of me feels petty for allowing myself to have been drawn into it.But the phenomenon is real, so it must be dealt with. Volumes of so-called arguments of this kindcould be assembled, wherein a psychologically angled vocabulary is used without apparently takinginto account the effect this is likely to have on uncritical minds. Though this kind of language isdoubtless not intended to degrade the humanities, it does nevertheless betray an artless style ofthinking in its authors. For if “real knowledge” is restricted to what is public and repeatable, what isleft for the humanities is mostly unreal knowledge or no knowledge at all.

I hope we are agreed that ad hominem arguments get us nowhere. Naturally, I wonder from timeto time if my high regard for life and the world is fathered by desire and mothered by need, but thisshoe fits everybody’s feet. Psychologists tell us that people give themselves more grief through toopoor estimates of themselves than through ones that are inflated; it is with self-reproach, not pride,that we have finally to deal. So if we let ourselves be drawn into this ignoble game of psychologicalone-upmanship, self-respect requires that we demand that the champions of the human nadir join us onthe psychiatrist’s couch—Beckett, who admits he was born depressed; Camus, Sartre, whoever yourlist includes—to see if Diane Keaton in Manhattan was right in seeing their gloomy worlds aspersonal neuroses inflated to cosmic proportions.13 Wittgenstein once remarked that the world of ahappy man is a happy world.

The storm is on its way out, but with a last, receding clap of thunder as it makes its departure.When the question of whether we are saved by grace or self-effort became an issue in Japanese Bud-dhist thought, a militant advocate of self-power (Nichiren) made a statement that wascounterdependent to a degree worthy of Fritz Perls. Personal responsibility being everything, heargued, a single supplication for help from the Buddhas was enough to send a man to hell. To which amember of the other-power school replied that as he was undoubtedly destined for hell anyway, beingtotally incapable of saving himself, he might as well take his supplications along with him ascomforts. I confess that, taste for taste, I find this latter posture more appealing than that ofexistentialists who strut life’s stage, hurling histrionically their Byronic defiance—“There’s nomeaning but my meaning; that which each of us personally creates”—at an unhearing universe; ErnestBecker is but one culture hero in this existentialist camp. And I can say why I find this latter group

less appealing. (This switch from psychologizing back to reason is a sign that the storm is over.) Theexistentialists are more self-centered—so, at least, their writings come through to me. In counteringthe mechanistic image of humanity that science produced, existentialism arose precisely to recall us toourselves, to remind us of our individuality and freedom—properties that science cannot deal with. Inmaking this correlation it served an important function; we humanists stand greatly in its debt. Butthere was something it did not see—probably could not see at mid-twentieth century. In counteringscience’s push for uniformities and determining forces it uncritically accepted a third scientificpremise, the man/world divide that Descartes and Newton first moved into place. This third premiseno more describes the actual nature of things than do the first two; all three are science’s workingprinciples—no more, no less. This uncritical acceptance of the third working principle of sciencedrove the existentialists into an alienated, embattled, egocentric depiction of the human condition. Inmistaking the separate, self-contained part of us for our true part, existentialism made a fatal mistakethat has confused and lowered our self-estimate. I use the past tense in speaking of it becauseincreasingly it has a passé flavor. It lingers on because theology and humanistic psychology have notgathered the academic strength to replace it with a convincing alternative, and philosophy has nothelped in their efforts.

So we come to our central question, asking not if an image of humanity loftier than either scienceor the existentialists have given us is possible in our times—that would again divert us to apsychological question, this time the question of whether Western civilization still has the vitality tobelieve great things.14 Instead, we ask whether this loftier image is true. Even here, though, we havenot reached the bottom line, for as we noted earlier, the final question is not whether man is noble butwhether reality is noble, it being impossible to answer the first question affirmatively unless thesecond is so answered.15 If it be asked why I do not produce a moral culprit for our reduced self-image (evil people who have ground that image into the dust by exploiting us) or even a social culprit(what hope for man in an age of mechanization and technique?), the answer is that important as thesetyrannies are, they are not our final problem. Our final adversary is the notion of a lifeless universe asthe context in which life and thought are set, one which without our presence in it would have to bejudged inferior to ourselves. Could we but shake off our anodynes for a moment we would see thatnothing could be more terrible than the condition of spirits in a supposedly lifeless and indifferentuniverse—Newton’s great mechanism of time, space, and inanimate forces operating automatically orby chance. Spirits in such a context are like saplings without water; their organs shrivel. Not thatthere has been ill intent in turning holy land into wasteland, garden into desert; just disastrousconsequences unforeseen. So we must pick up anew Blake’s Bow of Burning Gold to support “therise of soul against intellect” (Yeats), as intellect has come to be narrowly perceived. To continuewith Yeats, this time paraphrasing him, we must hammer loud upon the wall till truth at last obeys ourcall. We must produce some reasons.

IV. Leaving the Wasteland

Aimed not at individuals (scientists, say) or disciplines (science or the social sciences) but at habitsof thought that encroach on us all in the modern West—“there never was a war that was not inward”(Marianne Moore)—the reasons are of two sorts, positive and negative. As the negative reasons mesh

better with current styles of thought—what we currently take to be reasonable—I shall begin withthem. They are negative because they say nothing about what reality is like; they merely show that theclaim that it is a lifeless mechanism does not have a rational leg to stand on. My Forgotten Truthjoins the preceding essay in this book to work out this exposé in some detail. Here I can onlysummarize their combined argument:

1. We begin with motivations. Nothing is more uncompromising about ourselves than that we arecreatures that want.

2. These wants give rise to epistemologies. From the welter of impressions and surmises thatcourse through our streams of consciousness we register, firm up, and take to be true, those that stay inplace and support us like stepping stones in getting us to where we want to go. In the seventeenthcentury, Western man stumbled on a specialized way of knowing that we call the scientific method, apacket of directives counseling, first, what we should attend to, and then what we should do with theobjects that come into focus through this attention. This new epistemological probe dramaticallyincreased our understanding of how nature works and our control over it.16 As we welcomed thisincrease, we “went with” this way of knowing, enshrining it as the supreme way of getting at truth,and what it discloses as truth itself.

3. Epistemologies in turn produce ontologies—they create worldviews. In the case in question,the epistemology we fashioned to enlarge our cognitive bite into the natural world produced anontology that made nature central. It may not be accurate to call this new ontology materialism, butclearly it is naturalistic. Everything that exists must have a foothold in nature (space, time, andmatter), and in the end it must be subject to that footing.

4. Finally, ontologies generate anthropologies. Man being by definition a part of reality, hisnature must obviously conform to what reality is. So a naturalistic worldview produces, perforce, ahumanistic view of man, humanistic being used here as adjective, not for the humanities, but as adiminutive that makes embodied man man’s measure.

So far have we ventured down the road to this Promethean epistemology, naturalistic ontology,and humanistic anthropology that it is virtually impossible for us to see how arbitrary the entireoutlook is—how like a barren moonscape it would have appeared to our ancestors and continues toappear to everyone but ourselves. My own birth and early experience in China may make it easier forme to see Weber’s point, earlier referred to, that the way our Western minds work is not the wayhuman minds must work; but nothing turns on this. I think we can say that the negative way of makingour case for the humanities—our point that rationality in no way requires us to think that the garden isnot enchanted—has objective standing. We can argue with those who dispute us here.

V. Entering the Holy Land

Not so with reasons we may adduce for thinking that the garden is enchanted. These positive reasons

are not illogical, but whether we admit the fact grudgingly or glory in it, the fact itself remains: thesepositive reasons require, as their premises so to speak, sensibilities that are unevenly distributed andcultivated, so strictly rational clout cannot be expected of them.17 But as the Buddha said to Mara theTempter when the latter tried to persuade him not to bother to teach because there was no hope thatothers could fathom his culminating insight: “There will be some who will understand.” So I shallcontinue. Over the entrance to the magic lantern show in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf wasinscribed, “Not for Everybody.” The following four arguments will seem like such only to those whoat some level of their being have not been permitted to forget the immensity of what it means to betruly human.

1. The argument from the human majorityNo culture save our own has disjoined humanity from its world, life from what is presumed to benonlife, in the alienating way we have. As Gilbert Durand has pointed out,

the traditional image of man does not distinguish, nor even want to distinguish, the I from the Not-I, the world from man;whereas the entire teaching of modern Western civilization…strives to cut the world off from man, to separate the “I think”from what is thought. Dualism is the great “schizomorphic” structure of Western intelligence.18

Laurens van der Post tells of the South African bushmen that wherever they go, they feel themselvesknown, hence at home. There is no threat, no horror of emptiness or strangeness, only familiarity in afriendly, living environment, hence also the absence of any feeling of loneliness.19 One of my favoritepossessions is a kakimono (a hanging scroll painting) that was given to me by a Japanese friend. Infour Chinese characters that are bold and beautiful, it proclaims that heaven and earth are pervadedwith sentience, infused with feeling. This “majority rule” argument that I am beginning with mustnaturally face the suspicion that attends all reasonings to the effect that “fifty million Frenchmen can’tbe wrong,” that being France’s population when this adage was coined. But unless the minority (inthis case ourselves) can show reasons for thinking the majority is mistaken (and in this case suchreasons do not exist: that was the gist of my negative formulation of the case for the humanities), itseems wise to side with the majority. From within Western parochialism, the view that man is of apiece with his habitat may look like it belongs to “the childhood of the human race.” Freed from thatparochialism, it looks like man’s central surmise when the full range of human experience islegitimated and pondered profoundly: the view that is normal to the human condition becauseconsonant with the complete complement of human sensibilities.

2. The argument from scienceWe must be careful here, for science cannot take a single step toward proving transcendence. Butbecause it does prove things in its own domain, and that domain has turned out to be impressive,science has become the most powerful symbol for transcendence our age affords. I shall list threeteachings of contemporary science that carry powerful overtones for those who have ears to hear.

a. Fred Hoyle tells us that “no literary imagination could have invented a story one-hundredthpart as fantastic as the sober facts that [science has] unearthed.” 20 That reality has turned out to bequantitatively more extravagant than we had supposed suggests that its qualitative features may beequally beyond our usual suppositions. If the universe is spatially unbounded, perhaps it is limitless

in worth as well.b. Wholeness, integration, at-one-ment—the concept of unity is vital to the humanities; it is not

going too far to cite radical disunity (the man/world split as a final disjunction) as the fiction that hasreduced the humanities to their present low estate. Yet science has found nature to be unified to adegree that, again, we would not have surmised without its proofs. Matter and energy are one. Timeand space are one, time being space’s fourth dimension. Space and gravity are one: the latter issimply space’s curvature. And in the end, matter and its space-time field are one; what appears to usas a material body is nothing but a center of space-time’s deformation. Once again: If we could betaken backstage into the spiritual recesses of reality in the way physics has taken us into its physicalrecesses, might we not find harmony hidden there as well—earth joined to heaven, people walkingwith God, the entirity of things imbued with sentience?

c. The Cartesian/Newtonian paradigm will not work for quantum physics. It is going to be verydifficult to fashion an alternative, for the new physics is so strange that we will never be able tovisualize it or describe it consistently in ordinary language. But this is itself exciting. We do not knowwhere we are headed, but at least the door of the prison that alienated us and produced the Age ofAnxiety is now sprung. It is true that we do not know where we are going, but scientists themselvesare beginning to suggest that our haven may be nowhere in the space-time manifold, since thatmanifold is itself derivative and relative. Our final move may be into a different dimension of realityentirely. David Bohm calls this dimension “the implicate order,” an order to which Bell’s theorem,Geoffrey Chew’s S-matrix bootstrap model, and Karl Pribram’s holographic model of mind all seem(in their various ways) to point.

3. The argument from human health“Pascal’s wager” and James’s “will to believe” have made their place in philosophy by virtue oftheir sensible suggestions as to how to proceed in the face of uncertainty. I propose that we add tothem what might be called “the argument from human health.” I shall use something John Findlay haswritten about Hegel to make my point here, replacing his references to Hegel with phrases thatdescribe life’s final matrix—what in this essay I have been calling, with Weber, life’s garden.

In my not infrequent moods of exaltation I certainly sense my garden to be enchanted. When I do hard theoretical work andsucceed in communicating its results to others, I feel that the whole sense of the world lies in endeavors such as mine, thatthis is the whole justification of its countless atrocious irritants. I feel clear that the world has sense, and that no philosophythat sees it as disenchanted can express this sense satisfactorily. But in my more frequent mood of mild depression I do notsee the world thus. I see it as bereft of sense, and I submit masochistically to its senselessness, even taking more comfort inits cold credibility than in the rational desirability of an enchanted existence. I am not even convinced that there is one best orright perspective in which the world should be viewed: it seems a provocative staircase figure always idly altering itsperspective.21

The point is this: “depression” and “masochism” are pathological terms. To cast our lot withthem, assuming that we see most clearly when we are unwell rather than well, is itself a pathologicalmove. The healthy move, it would seem, is to ground our outlooks in our noblest intuitions. This leadsto my fourth and final consideration.

4. The argument from special insights

End meets beginning: I come at my close to my title, which is drawn from something that happens tothe hero in William Golding’s novel, Free Fall. Samuel Mountjoy—his name itself elicits a smallgasp in the context of the burden and promise of the humanities—is in a Nazi concentration campawaiting questioning about plans for a prison break. Frantically, he rehearses the tortures that are sureto be inflicted on him to extract the scrap of information he possesses when suddenly, in his ownwords, “I was visited by a flake of fire, miraculous and pentecostal; and fire transmuted me, once andforever.” 22

Intimations like these come, and when they do, we do not know whether the happiness they bringis the rarest or the commonest thing on earth, for in all earthly things we find it, give it, and receive it,but cannot hold onto it. When it comes, it seems in no way strange to be so happy, but in retrospect wewonder how such gold of Eden could have been ours. The human opportunity, always beckoning butnever in this life reached, is to stabilize that gold; to let such flakes of fire turn us into “handfuls oflight.” This second image comes from a tradition in Islam that reads, “God took a handful of His light,and said to it ‘Be Muhammad.’ ” In its esoteric, Sufic reading, the Muhammad here referred to is theLogos, the Universal Man, the Image of God that is in us all—our essence that awaits release.

6

Philosophy:The Contemporary Crisis

Walker Percy says today’s novel is in a mess. He admits that it’s always been in a mess, but hesees its current mess as singular. Previously, there was a background of shared meanings againstwhich authors could make their characters stand out, but today no such consensual backdrop exists.

Philosophy, also seems to be in a singular mess, one evidence being the number of influentialphilosophers who see no future for the discipline, or at most a minimal one. Wittgenstein came to seeits only real service as therapy—undoing the mental knots philosophy itself creates. Heideggerannounced the end of metaphysics to which Rorty adds “the end of epistemology.” And now JamesEdwards and Bernard Williams are turning down the lights on philosophical ethics with their Ethicswithout Philosophy and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, respectively. What remains after theseclosures seems to be “conversation” and “play,” to which neither Rorty nor Derrida sees philosophyas having anything distinctive to contribute. Hilary Putnam says “the tradition is in shambles,”1 andKai Nielsen concurs: “There is no defending the tradition. Systematic analytic philosophy and itsContinental cousins along with their historical ancestors must be given up.” 2 “Epitaph-writing,”Alasdair MacIntyre reports, “has been added to the list of accepted philosophical activities.” 3

The object of this chapter is to trace the steps that have led to this identity crisis for thediscipline, and to ask what might be done in the face of it. I shall use the plenary address that RichardRorty delivered at the Eleventh (1985) Inter-American Congress of Philosophy in Mexico City as myentrée to the project.

If nineteenth-century philosophy began with Romantic Idealism and ended by worshipping thepositive sciences, Rorty points out, twentieth-century philosophy began by revolting against anarrowly empiricist positivism and ended by returning

to something reminiscent of Hegel’s sense of humanity as an essentially historical being, one whose activities in all spheresare to be judged not by its relation to non-human reality but by comparison and contrast with its earlier achievements and withutopian futures. This return will be seen as having been brought about by philosophers as various as Heidegger, Wittgenstein,Quine, Gadamer, Derrida, Putnam and Davidson.4

That says a lot in small compass, so let me repeat it, adding a few particulars. The nineteenthcentury began with a reaction against the scientism of the Enlightenment, protesting its claim thatmathematical demonstration provides the model for inquiry and positive science the model forculture. It ended, though, by swinging back to Enlightenment predilections and shunting off intoliterature the counter-Enlightenment sentiments that had given rise to the Romantic Movement and

German Idealism. So philosophy entered the twentieth century allied to science. Experimental sciencebeing outside its province, this meant following Husserl and Russell into mathematics and logic.Husserl soon deviated from that program to found a brand new approach to philosophy—phenomenology—which would replicate science’s apodicticity without using its logic. Heidegger’sBeing and Time subverted that move and thenceforth Continental philosophy renounced bothapodicticity and deduction. In English-speaking countries, though, Russell’s slogan that “logic is theessence of philosophy” persisted, and ability to follow completeness proofs for formal systemsreplaced foreign language as a professional requirement.

Even the Anglo-American attempt to “do philosophy” via logic eventually abandonedapodicticity, though, for non-Euclidean geometries showed logic to be flexible; since it works equallywell with whatever primitives we begin with, it produces nothing that is unequivocal. In theirPrincipia Mathematica, Whitehead and Russell spelled this out by developing a “logic of relations”to replace the reigning logic of things, and Cassier and C. I. Lewis went on to relativize Kant whoseCritique had dominated modern epistemology. The human mind is not programmed to see the worldin a single way. It sees it in different ways as time and cultures decree.

This drive towards pluralism didn’t stop with epistemology; it pressed on into ontology. Havingsatisfied themselves that our minds require nothing of us, philosophers proceeded to argue that theworld doesn’t require anything of us, either. Their way of doing this was to go after Plato’s essencesand Aristotle’s substance, for if these exist, they could draw the mind up short and thinking would notbe indefinitely malleable. Again, it is important to see this second rejection—the rejection of thefixity of things to accompany the rejection of the fixity of logic—as motivated by the samedetermination to stem the tide of the Enlightenment Project in its twentieth-century positivisticversion, for if there is a way things are, it was pretty clear that the twentieth century would take it tobe the way the sciences collectively report; the Vienna Circle with its “unification of sciencemovement” was championing just this dénouement. Rorty brought these two rejections together andshowed how central they were to twentieth-century philosophy:

I do not think it far-fetched to see such different books as Carnap’s Logische Aufbau der Welt, Cassirer’s Philosophy ofSymbolic Forms, Whitehead’s Process and Reality, Quine’s Word and Object, Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking,Putnam’s Reason, Truth and History, and Davidson’s Essays on Truth and Interpretation as developments of the anti-Aristotelian and anti-substantialist, anti-essentialist implication common to Principia Mathematica and to the development ofnon-Euclidean geometries.5

Again, we should not lose sight of the motivation in all this. Seeing no way in which (in the faceof the scientific temper of the twentieth century) it could register a view of reality that could competewith the scientistic one that was gaining ground, philosophy took the next best step. It went after thenotion of a single worldview period: the notion that there is one unequivocal, comprehensive waythat things actually are, or if there is, that human minds can have any knowledge of what that way is.This meant renouncing what historically had been philosophy’s central citadel, metaphysics. Better nometaphysics at all than the one that was threatening to take over.

But if the “post-Nietzschean deconstruction of metaphysics” (as discussed in the second essay inthis book) excused philosophers from thinking about the world, what should they be thinking about?We saw that during the early, positivistic decades of the twentieth century when philosophers thoughtscience was the royal road to truth, they latched onto logic as the slice of science that they could

service: let the experimental scientists discover synthetic truths; philosophers would monitor theanalytic truths that were also needed. In 1951, though, Quine demolished the analytic/synthetic,fact/meaning distinction with his Two Dogmas of Empiricism. With the analytic rug thus pulled outfrom under them, philosophers retreated to ordinary language for a preserve of meaning that didn’tdepend on logic, yet needed attention. Now, though, the wall around that refuge is being dismantled byDonald Davidson’s critique of the distinction between the “formal” or “structural” features ofdiscourse and its “material” ones. The correct theory of meaning, Davidson argues, is one thatdispenses with entities called “meanings” altogether; instead of asking “What is the meaning of anexpression?” it asks, “How does this expression function in this particular linguistic move?” With thistotal de-logicizing and naturalizing of language, the division between it and the rest of life disappears.Instead of a “structure” or body of rules that philosophers can discover and help others to see—oreven the multiple structures and rules that Lewis and Cassier talked about—language now looks likesimply another human way of coping with the world.

It really isn’t surprising, therefore, to find philosophers closing shop, for if logic isn’tphilosophy’s essence (Quine) and language isn’t either (Davidson), the question “what essenceremains?” cannot be avoided. We can argue over whether essence is the right word here, but let mecome to the point. The deepest reason for the current crisis in philosophy is its realization thatautonomous reason—reason without infusions that both power and vector it—is helpless. By itself,reason can deliver nothing apodictic. Working (as it necessarily must) with variables, variables areall it can come up with. The Enlightenment’s “natural light of reason” turns out to have been a myth.Reason is not itself a light. It is more like a transformer that does useful things, but on condition that itis hitched to a generator.

Clearly aware of reason’s contingency, medieval philosophy attached itself to theology as itshandmaiden. Earlier, Plato too had accepted reason’s contingency and grounded his philosophy inintuitions that are discernible by the “eye of the soul,” but not by reason without it. In the seventeenthcentury, though, responding to the advent of Modern science with the controlled experiment as its newand powerful way of getting at truth, philosophy unplugged from theology. Bacon and Comte wereready to replug it at once, this time into science, but there were frequencies science still couldn’tregister, so philosophy took off on its own. Why suppose that reason requires support? If we likenreason to a lever, philosophy as deployed in the Modern age has been philosophy as conceived inliberty and dedicated to the proposition that reason possesses its own Archimedian point. There aredebates as to what that point is—Descartes’s innate ideas? Kant’s categories of reason? Thepositivists’ sense data? But that reason has a fixed point of reference from which to proceed was not,for the three centuries during which Modernity was in place, seriously doubted.

And because it was not doubted, philosophy could have a healthy self-image. For culture is anassemblage of components—science, history, morality, religion, and art, among others—all of whichmake knowledge claims. Because knowledge per se is philosophy’s province—in the Modern period,epistemology became its central occupation—it seemed to “stand to reason,” as we say, thatphilosophers were the ones who were qualified to monitor the conceptual foundations of culture’scomponents, validating where appropriate, debunking where not. In a very real sense, this made it—not just in its own eyes but in those of the general public—culture’s arbiter: philosophy wasfoundational to culture. Kantians and positivists saw their talents as especially fitting them for thisposition, as have analytic philosophers who monitor the language we all must use.

It is to Rorty’s and MacIntyre’s great credit that they have had the courage and insight to see thatthese claims for philosophy are hollow. In a dramatic exchange during the December 1980 meeting ofthe American Philosophical Association, Rorty pressed his critics to offer examples of cases “wheresome philosophical inquiry into the conceptual foundations of X provided any furtherance of X oranything else, or even any furtherance of our understanding of X or anything else.” Kai Nielson tellsus that the challenge has not been met.6

The collapse of a self-image that has powered a profession for almost four hundred years, givingit in that stretch both hope and a sense of high calling, is no small occurrence. It makes it impossiblefor the discipline to continue as usual. There seems to be a consensus that if philosophy is to continueas a profession, it must take a new turn.

To see what that turn might be, we can go back to Rorty for a moment. We watched him point outthat for most of the twentieth century Anglo-American philosophy was powered by science’sproblems and premises, whereas Continental philosophy turned to literature. He ended his address bynoting that politics provides a third possible generator for philosophy, but he advises against it since“to assume that it is our task to be the avant-garde of political movements” would reduce philosophyto propaganda.

There is a fourth possible “primer” for philosophy though, which Rorty doesn’t mention, perhapsbecause he is himself powered by it to the point where he simply takes it for granted. This fourthgenerator is social science, and the rising importance of names like Habermas and Gadamer suggestthat the human sciences are bidding to displace the natural sciences in providing philosophers withtheir premises and problems. If science shouldn’t monitor our thinking because it countenances onlyhalf of reality, and metaphysics (which tries to work from reality’s whole) is pretense and delusion,let societies—“forms of life,” or cultural-linguistic wholes—be the final arbitors of meaning, reality,and truth. George Will is right: “The magic word of modernity is ‘society.” 7

The notion that points philosophy towards the social sciences is holism. Even while philosophywas powered by science, mounting evidence for the mind’s propensity to gestalt its experiences ledN. R. Hanson to argue that “all facts are theory-laden” and Thomas Kuhn to write The Structure ofScientific Revolution, which for a quarter of a century has been the most cited book on collegecampuses and has turned paradigm into a household word. Heidegger and Wittgenstein had alreadypushed matters beyond the philosophy of science, though, by grounding theoretical in practicalholism, and their augmented version, too, is now all but accepted.8 Because thinking invariablyproceeds in social contexts and against a backdrop of social practices, meaning derives from—rootsdown into and draws its life from—those backgrounds and contexts. Hence, in considering an idea,not only must we (if we are to be thorough) take into account the conceptual gestalts of which it is apart. We must also consider the social “forms of life” (Wittgenstein) whose “micro-practices”(Foucault) give gestalts their final meaning. “Agreement in judgments means agreement in whatpeople do and say, not what they believe,” Wittgenstein insists.9

This move to work in concert with the human sciences signals more vitality than the proposal toabandon ship, but it seems unlikely that philosophers will content themselves indefinitely with dead-ending their questions in forms of life. For social wholes are self-enclosed; unrelieved, a form of lifeis a kind of collective "egocentric predicament,” if not solipsism. Those predicaments can seeminvincible if one accepts their premises, but philosophy has never, on balance, knuckled under tothem.

The two kinds of boundaries that social holism acquiesces to are, first, the kind that separatessuch wholes from one another, and second, the one that isolates configurations of phenomenalexperiences as such from the noumenal world that transcends the human. Admittedly, both kinds ofwalls are difficult to breech. Two decades of trying to figure out how tribes that speak differentlanguages can communicate have underscored the difficulty of transcending cultural-linguistichorizons, while phenomenology’s epoche (bracketing what lies outside of human experience) all butgives up on the prospect of breeching the noumenal/phenomenal barrier. David Pears callsWittgenstein’s conclusion that “there is no conceivable way of getting between language and theworld and finding out whether there is a general fit between them” the central thesis of his lateryears.10 When all is said and done, however—when we have made every concession we can think ofto the difficulty (verging on impossibility) of climbing out of our skins, out of our languages, out ofour times—this fact remains: of all the life forms on earth, we and we only possess the ability to viewthe world detachedly, which is to say to some degree transperspectivally and objectively. This is theimportant point in Thomas Nagel’s The View From Nowhere: that we can think about the world interms that transcend our own experience and interests and, yes, times and culture, too, considering itfrom a vantage point which, being not entirely perspectival save as it is humanly so, is “nowhere inparticular.”

The first place where the limitations of cultural-linguistic holism are beginning to show up is inthe difficulties it is having with the problem of relativism. If the issues of philosophy lead to (anddead-end in) a plurality of collective, phenomenal configurations of experience, leaving us no morethan social functionaries, there appears to be no court of appeal for adjudicating between thesecollective experiences. If forms of life are the bottom line, what recourse is there for affirming thatone such form is better than another? Is there any way we can take seriously the possibility that ourown cultural-linguistic epoch, say, may have taken a wrong turn, and if it has, what criterion promptsthat verdict? Pragmatic outcomes seem to be the only court of appeal, but though useful forprovisional purposes, pragmatic criteria never tell the whole story, for if cockroaches are to inheritthe earth, that would not induce us to consider them our superiors. Cultural-linguistic holismstammers answers to relativism; it can counter “vulgar relativism” by appealing to currents ofconsensus that underlie superficial differences. But this no more saves the day than the structuralsturdiness of a house redeems it if it is about to slide off its mountain perch.

A second besetting problem for holism concerns truth, for which it can provide no basis otherthan consensus. It seems strained, for example, and in the end indefensible to argue (as Kripkecontends Wittgenstein argues11) that even the rules of arithmetic have no validity beyond the socialconsensus that supports them.

These difficulties alone are enough to suggest that social holism is at best a way-station onphilosophy’s sojourn. If we try to anticipate where it might go next, the most I can suggest is that(riding its current realization that thinking is invariably “situated”) it take another look at thepossibility that its basic situation is a condition that is generically human. The roots of thinking do notstop with collectivities. They extend into soil that is the same for all human communities.

But getting philosophy out of its present crisis was not the object of this chapter.

7

Theology:The Unstable Détente with Science

From higher education (our intellectual frontier), through its most value-laden regions (the humanitiesand philosophy, in particular) to God the source of it all—the essays in this section ascend in theregions they examine. As loss of transcendence and the sense of the sacred is one of Postmodernism’sdefining features, sight naturally has to work harder as the eye ascends: one must look more intently,as in unfamiliar territory. As the preceding essays have noted, the collective energies of the West havemoved steadily into science and technology, whose presiding motivation has been to control. Oneimportant consequence of this was already evident in the nineteenth century: not only religion but artwere being moved to the margins. Hegel spoke of both together when he said that, however splendidthe gods look in modern works of art, whatever dignity and perfection we might find in the images ofGod the Father and the Virgin Mary, it is of no use: we no longer bend our knees. “It is a long time,”Saul Bellow adds in his Nobel Laureate lecture, “since knees were bent in piety.”

1. Thesis

Against the prevailing assumption that “the warfare between science and theology” (to resurrect W.E. H. Lecky’s phrase) is a thing of the past, I propose to argue that if this is true it can only be becausescience has won the war. Only an exhausted theology, one about to sink into the sands of science likea spent wave, could fail to sense the enormous tension between its claims and those of a scientificworldview.

There is, of course, a sense in which no tension exists or has ever existed. As truth is one andreligion and science are both concerned with it, in principle they must be partners. But that isprinciple only—de jure, not de facto. For the partnership to work, we would need to see clearly theinherent limitations of science and keep them in sharp focus. But we do not see these limitations,largely (I suspect) because we do not want to. Because science augments our power and possessions,we would like to think that it has no cutoff point; that its present limitations are provisional only, andthat in time it will break out of them to service our complete selves in the way it now services ourbodily needs. So we encourage it to expand, and count on its doing so. Mostly we want itstechnological fallout, but we want its theories, too. For modern science derives from the controlledexperiment, and as that is as close to proof as we can get, a scientific worldview would be one wecould wholeheartedly believe. It would be true.

It happens, though, that a scientific worldview is impossible. I do not mean that we are a longway from having such a view; I mean that we never will have one—it is impossible in principle, acontradiction in terms. For “world” implies whole, and science deals with part, an identifiable partof the whole that can be shown to be part only—most of this paper will be devoted to this showing.Again, it is crucial to see that this is not a temporary limitation but one that is built into science’s verynature. To hope for a worldview from science is like hoping that increasingly detailed maps ofIllinois will eventually produce the ultimate map of the United States.

Three times before in this book I have walked up to this point, approaching it from differentdirections to try to see precisely where the boundaries of science lie. Here I propose to pull thesesallies together—that the Oxford English Dictionary defines sally as “rush of besieged uponbesiegers” makes the word exact here. But because I shall be riding this issue hard, devoting most ofmy space to it, I should say why I see the limits of science as at once the most important point weneed to be straight on in relating science to theology, and concomitantly the one we have yet to seeclearly.

It seems to be agreed that a defining feature of modernity is loss of transcendence. The sense ofthe sacred has declined; phrases like “the death of God” and “eclipse of God” would have beeninconceivable in earlier days. I assume that readers will agree, in addition, that this is a real loss;fading of the belief that we live in an ordered universe which is related to other, unseen realms oforder in a total harmony cannot but have serious consequences. That people now believe less intheologies generally is one thing,1 but we must note, too, that the content of the theologies they arenow offered has been diluted. It has been toned down to fit better with our prevailing, largely secular,mindset.

This last is the most controversial point I shall make, and it may be mistaken though I do notthink so. As section three of this essay will be devoted to it, I hurry on here to ask: if our age istheologically on the defensive, what drove it into the corner? Many things, one can assume, but itseems clear to me—so clear that I will not even argue the point here—that its chief assailant has beenmodern science. Science has spawned an outlook whose chief features are naturalism (the view thatnothing that lacks a material component exists, and that in what does exist it is its physical componentthat has the final say), evolution (generalized as the belief that the more derives exhaustively from theless, the higher from the lower), and progress (the centering of hope on a this-worldly, historicalfuture). If we match these planks against the platform that issues from Revelation, we get thefollowing lineup:

Were we mentally capable of keeping the science column in its place, there would be noproblem, but the triumphs of science have been too impressive to allow this. Method has mushroomedinto metaphysics, science into scientism, the latter defined as the drawing of conclusions from sciencethat do not logically follow. I do not charge this against science, nor its votaries whom I regard with ablend of gratitude, affection, and awe. Scientism is a mark of our times, one we are all victims of andresponsible for: in Descartes’s fall, we sinned all. As there is no space here to trace its workingspiecemeal, I propose to strike at the root. Through the three demonstrations of science’s limitations Ishall enter, I hope to expose the delusion that our prevailing, predominantly secular outlook isscientific by showing that it is debarred in principle from generating a genuinely inclusive outlook. Ifmy strategy succeeds, it will show that theology need cater to our prevailing styles of thought only if itwishes to. Nothing in the way of evidence requires that it do so.

II. The Limits of Science

First DemonstrationIn Forgotten Truth, I noted that though science is not monolithic, its distinctive way of getting at truth—the scientific method—gives it a defining thrust. No knowledge deserves to be called scientificunless it is objective in the sense of laying claim to intersubjective agreement, but we move closer toscience proper when we discover truths that enable us to predict, and closer still when we reachtruths that facilitate control. Each move we make along this line finds our knowing meshingincreasingly with mathematics, number being (as we say) the language of science.2

The achievements of this probe for truth have been so dazzling that they have blinded us to thefact that they proceed from an extremely restricted kind of knowing. As mentioned in earlier chapters,there are four things science cannot get its hands on:3

1. Intrinsic and Normative ValuesScience can deal with instrumental values, but not intrinsic ones. It can tell us that smoking

damages health, but whether health is better than somatic gratification it cannot adjudicate. Again, itcan determine what people do like, but not what they should like. Opinion polls and market researchare sciences, but there cannot be a science of the summum bonum.

2. PurposesTeleonomy, yes; teleology, no. The biological sciences acknowledge that living organisms are

goal directed, and therefore purposive in that sense. They must insist, though, that biological drives,homeostasis, and the like, be explained in terms of things that themselves derived nonpurposively, forto introduce intentions into explanations is anthropomorphic, and anthropomorphic explanations arethe opposite of scientific ones. Francis Bacon said this early on. “Teleological explanations inscience are the province of theology, not science,” he wrote. “They are like virgins dedicated to God,and therefore barren of empirical fruit for the good of man.”4 His point has stayed in place. “Thecornerstone of scientific method is…the systematic denial that ‘true’ knowledge can be got at byinterpreting phenomena in terms of final causes—that is to say, of ‘purposes.’ ”5

3. Ultimate and Existential MeaningsScience is meaningful throughout, but there are two kinds of meanings it cannot handle. One of

these is ultimate meanings (what is the meaning of life; what is the meaning of it all?), while the othertype is existential (the kind we have in mind when we say something is meaningful for mepersonally). There is no way science can force the human mind to find its discoveries involving; thehearer always has the option to shrug his shoulders and walk away. Unable to deal with these twokinds of meanings, science “fails in the face of all ultimate questions” (Jaspers) and leaves “theproblems of life completely untouched” (Wittgenstein). “Only questions which cannot be answeredwith scientific precision have any real significance” (E. F. Schumacher).

4. QualityThis is fundamental, for it is their qualitative components that make values, meanings, and

purposes important. But qualities, being subjective, barely lend themselves to even the minimumrequirement of science—objectivity—let alone submit to quantification. Certain qualities (such ascolors or sounds) have quantifiable substrates (electromagnetic waves of varying lengths), but qualityitself is unmeasurable. Euphrometers have been attempted, but without success, for two pains do notadd up to one that is twice as painful, and half a happiness makes no sense. Science’s inability to dealwith the qualitatively unmeasurable leaves it working with what Lewis Mumford called a“disqualified universe.”

This account of what science cannot deal with can expect to encounter resistance, but not (as faras I have been able to discern) because it is untrue. Given the importance of normative values, finalcauses, existential and ultimate meanings, and intrinsic qualities, the fact that science is no closer nowthan it ever was to dealing with them would seem to be clear indication that it is not designed fortheir investigation.6 Appeals to the infancy of science only obscure the issue by postponing thequestion of whether its advances can possibly fill in the lacunae. The answer is no: the change fromclassical to relativity physics was momentous, but it did not move physics one whit closer to theuntended areas. And we can see why it did not do so. For science to enter the domains it has thus fareschewed, it would have to relax the demands for objectivity, prediction, control, and number fromwhich its power in quantitative domains derives. We are free, of course, to turn science in this newdirection if we want to, but we must realize that every step toward humanizing the enterprise will bea step away from the effectiveness it has thus far manifested. For to repeat, it is precisely from thenarrowness of its approach that the power of science derives. An effective and restricted science orone that is ample but does not enable us to control the course of events much more than do art,religion, or psychotherapy—we can define the word as we wish. What is not possible is to have itboth ways.

Second DemonstrationWhereas the preceding demonstration sought to show how barren a scientific worldview perforcemust be, disclosing perhaps as much of reality as an X-ray negative discloses of a human self, thissecond demonstration notes that it would also be stunted—or better, truncated.

The reasoning behind that statement is as follows:7

Worldviews arise from epistemologies, which in turn are generated by the motivations that

control them. In the seventeenth century, Europe hit upon an epistemology (empiricism, the scientificmethod8) that augmented its control dramatically—over nature to start with, but who knew where suchcontrol might eventually reach? This increase in power pleased us to the point that we gave this wayof knowing pride of place. And with that move, the die was cast respecting worldview. Empiricismproceeds through sense knowledge, and that which connects with our senses is matter. I do not saythat the worldview this epistemology has generated is materialism (the view that nothing but matterexists), for our thoughts and feelings are, on the one hand, too conspicuous to be denied and, on theother, too different from what we experience matter to be to be reduced to it. It is safer to dub ourworldview “naturalism,” defining this (as I did in the first section of this essay) as the view (a) thatnothing that lacks a material component exists, and (b) that in what does exist the physical componenthas the final say. That at the level of quantum mechanics this component seems to be“dematerializing” has not shaken our naturalism because matter (however we define it, howeverghostly it may seem) remains what we can get our hands on and control. The problem lies deeper thanwillfulness—wanting to have our way with nature—for even our search for disinterested truth isdrawn to naturalism and empiricism. Control includes, importantly, the controlled experiment, andthis (more than any other form of validation) inspires confidence.

Now comes the point: the kind of world(view) the will to control generates. Again let mecharacterize it negatively. An epistemology that aims relentlessly at control rules out the possibility oftranscendence in principle.9

By “transcendence” I mean something superior to us by every measure of value we know anddoubtless some we do not know. To expect a transcendental object to appear on a viewing screenwired by an epistemology that is set for control would be tantamount to expecting color to appear ona television screen that was built for black and white. We can “put nature to the rack,” as Baconadvised, because it is our inferior; possessing (in the parts we can get at, at least) neither mind norfreedom, these parts can be pushed around. But if things superior to us exist—extraterrestrialintelligences superior to our own? angels? God?—these are not going to fit into our controlledexperiments.10 It is they who dance circles around us, not we them.

Naturalism’s exclusion of things superior to nature combines with its discovery that withinnature the superior comes after the inferior, and (to a yet undetermined extent) can be controlled viaits inferior components, leaves it no option regarding etiology. Accounting must proceed from inferiorto superior, from less to more. Chronologically and developmentally, the more comes after the less;causally, it comes out of the less, the only other determining principle allowed being chance.11 Inbiology (with Darwin), higher forms come after and out of the lower; in sociology (with Marx), theclassless society comes after and out of class struggle; in psychology (with Freud), the rational egocomes after and out of the irrational id. Even when the higher has appeared, the thrust is to understandand interpret its workings in terms of the lower. The name for this mode of explanation is, of course,reductionism, and the growth of the scientific worldview can be correlated with its advance. ForNewton, stars became machines. For Descartes, animals were machines. For Hobbes, society is amachine. For La Mettrie, the human body is a machine. For Pavlov and Skinner, human behavior ismechanical.

Third DemonstrationIf the preceding demonstration showed that a scientific worldview cannot rise above ourselves in the

sense of providing a place for anything that is superior to us, this third and fully final check on itslimitations shows that it cannot even accommodate ourselves. For scientific knowledge is theoretical,whereas the bulk of human understanding is practical.12 Practical understanding cannot beaccommodated to theoretical knowledge.

Scientific knowledge is theoretical in that it consists of identifiable elements that aresystematically related, and this differentiates it sharply from practical knowing—knowing how to ridea bicycle, say, or how to swim. In these latter cases, our knowledge proceeds in almost total oblivionof the components involved—muscles, nerves, cells, and the like—and their coordinations. It is a“knowing how,” rather than a “knowing that.”

Another way to put the difference is to say that theoretical knowledge is context-free, whereaspractical understanding is not. Once we consciously identify something, our minds can isolate it fromits context. In looking at a vase, I cannot separate my sensation of blue from the vase, but once mymind tells me that the vase is blue, though the copula purports to join blueness to vase, in a far morefateful way it disjoins the two. For I can now think blueness without vase and this frees me to move itaround my conceptual world at will. In abstracting—extracting—blueness from vase, cognition makesit context free.

Science capitalizes on this freedom from context and tries to show us a contextless world, aview of things that is not affected by even the fact that it derives from our human angle of vision. Andwhen it goes on to try to understand human beings (through the social sciences), this goal continues. Itsearches for behavior ingredients that are invariant—the same regardless of their context—and thelawful relations these exhibit. The theories that summarize these relations currently take the form offormal models in which the facts are context-free elements or attributes or features or informationbits, and the model is a computer program or flow chart showing how such elements are combined toproduce complex individual or social behavior.

That these models, be they in structural anthropology, cognitive psychology, or decision analysis,have succeeded no better than their predecessors in enabling their practitioners to predict, or insnowballing into a unified theory of human nature that compares in any way to the unified view ofnature that undergirds the physical sciences, should not surprise us, for to return to the nub of thisthird demonstration, most human knowledge is not theoretical but practical, and even theoreticalknowledge rides on a practical base. Practical knowing can no more be separated from its context (tobecome available to abstract theory) than knowing how to swim can be separated from water.Through cultivated body responses, the “tentacles” of our swimming skill grip the physical world likea root system; and in social skills it is the same, the difference being only that here the context is abackground of shared beliefs and practices which we internalize through imitation. Social skills, suchas how far to stand from a conversational partner depending on age, sex, status, and purpose, embodya whole cultural interpretation of what it means to be a human being, what a material object is, and(more generally) what counts as real. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein have shownconvincingly, I believe, that this inherited background of practices can never be spelled out in atheory (to be fed into a computer), first, because it is so pervasive that we cannot stand outside it tomake it an object of analysis, but even more because in the last resort it is not composed of cognitivefeatures such as beliefs and assumptions at all, but rather of habits and customs, the sort of subtleskills which we exhibit in our everyday interaction with things and people—what Michel Foucaultcalls micropractices. No one has the slightest idea how to construct formal rules for the skills

involved in swimming or speaking a language, let alone those embodying our understanding of what itmeans to be a human being and live a human life.

III. Theological Compromise?

That was a long section, so let me reiterate its point. Believing that the decline in our sense oftranscendence is a loss, and that the chief reason for the decline has been the rise of a rival outlookpresumed to be scientific, I think that it is important to show that that supposition is mistaken. Lackingspace to show point by point where the error enters, I am going (in this essay) after the notion of ascientific worldview itself, and have presented three lines of argument that converge in theconclusion that there can be no such thing. When we find someone writing that “science is themeasure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not,”13 we know automaticallythat scientism, not science, is speaking.

But now comes the touchy part. Of the five postures Richard Niebuhr showed the Church to haveassumed toward culture in the course of its history—against it, with it, above it, paradoxical towardit, and with intent to transform it14—we are clearly in a “with culture” phase; Vatican II formalizedthis for Roman Catholicism and Bultmann’s victory over Barth is a weather vane for Protestantism.But if our culture is riddled with scientism—the problem being, as Victor Frankl puts it, not that thenscientists are specializing, but that the specialists are generalizing—in conforming to culture, theChurch runs the danger of scientistic rub-off.

There is no way to insure against this danger, but the guidelines (at least) seem clear. It goeswithout saying that theologians should respect the proven findings of science and can continue toaffirm as they have (in the past three decades especially) that:

Scientists are no less blessed with human virtues than the rest of us. Their work does not pull against their idealism, goodwill, and natural piety (Harold Schilling, William Pollard, Ian Barbour).

Their intellectual virtues are not mechanical—limited to logic and linear thinking. Great science requires as muchimagination, inspiration, and “art” as any other creative endeavor (Abraham Maslow, Michael Polanyi).

Equally, as institution, science is as fallible as other social efforts. False starts, blind alleys, in-house vendettas and outrightdishonesty plague it as much as they do the Church (Thomas Kuhn, James Watson’s The Double Helix, and again Polanyi).

These commonalities, though, should not be allowed to obscure (first) the distinctiveness ofscientific knowing, and (second) the limited character of the conclusions that can issue from thatdistinctiveness.

The first of these two dividing, rather than reconciling, tasks is currently complicated by a movewithin the philosophy of science itself that slurs the difference between scientific and other ways ofknowing. Because at advanced levels the components of science are not tested against experience oneby one but only as a whole via theories, it is now generally accepted that scientific facts are theoryladen. In verifying a theory, we move in a circle from hypothesis to data, data to hypothesis, withoutever encountering any bare facts which could call the whole theory into question. From this (nowrecognized) holistic character of science—from the point, to repeat it, that the facts of science, likemost others, must be “interpreted” in the light of the systems in which they appear15—this new thrust

concludes that science doesn’t differ in kind from other self-contained systems of thought such ascommon sense, or even witchcraft. Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method pushes this claim to anarchistextremes, but its basic point, which can be traced back to Pierre Duhem in the nineteenth century,appears in varying degrees in the writings of N. R. Hanson, Willard Quine, and Richard Rorty.

We can agree that science is holistic, but the theoretical character of its holism, which gestaltsexplicitly identified, context-free components, still differentiates it from other kinds of holism; thiswas the burden of the third demonstration in the preceding section. This difference must be kept inmind, for if we lose sight of the distinctive, restricted way science goes after knowledge, we willthink that its findings harbor more implications for theology than they logically do.

As these implications slope toward naturalism, evolution,16 and progress, if we insist ondrawing them—or, what is more common, if we lower our guard, in which case they are sure to enterundetected—theology will suffer. I think I see this happening. I say this tentatively. Kennett Roshi ofMount Shasta Zen Abbey once remarked that she was working on a new mantra, “I could be wrong,”and I would like to have that apply to the balance of this section.

So numerous are the theological innovations of Modernity that one wonders if, at someunconscious level, they may not be fed by the assumption that as scientific knowledge is cumulative,all knowledge should be.17 Be that as it may, when I scan the content of these innovations, what Imostly see is loss—loss that has been suffered, not from the proven facts of science, but from vaporsthat rise from them like steam, obscuring our sight:

1. Personalism concludes that we must relieve God of either his/her omnipotence or his/hergoodness.

2. Bultmann’s demythologizing rides the dismantling of a pre-Copernican picture of the physicaluniverse to dismantle, in addition, the great chain of being. If only because of what Heidegger (fromwhom Bultmann draws) will not permit us to say, on pain of inauthentic objectivizing, I do not see hisBeing as a match for either the living God of the Bible or the ens perfectissimum of medievaltheology.

3. The theology of hope historicizes Christian expectations and introduces development intoGod, who in ways is “not yet.”

4. Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of Christ as “the term of evolution” upsets his alpha-omegabalance and makes meaning turn on the fate of nature.

5. As I was myself weaned on process theology, I shall give it three paragraphs, beginning againwith loss.18 It deprives God of exclusive ultimacy, asking that he/she share that status with three othergivens: creativity, eternal objects, and the structure of actual occasions.19 It rules out the possibility ofa concrete, timeless perfection; only abstract entities (eternal objects) are eternal. And it replacessubjective human immortality with an objective version in which we are remembered by God; thetraditional teaching that we must all one day awaken from life’s dream into other dimensions in whichthe lie shrivels, the fiction fades, and all deceptions are swept away, is discounted. On what authority,

save the naturalism to which process theology is beholden? We can at least be clear, this essay hasargued, that science doesn’t force naturalism on us.

Process theologians themselves, of course, do not see these revisions as losses, for to themclassical theism is incoherent. Had their notion of coherence ruled at Nicea and Chalcedon, thecreeds could not have come down to us as they have. Or to approach the point from a contemporaryangle, is there any “incoherence” in classical theism—many are charged—that does not have itscounterpart in the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, and cannot, with deep discernment, be broughtunder Niels Bohr’s claim that, whereas the opposite of a small truth is false, the opposite of a greattruth is another great truth?

I was not myself conscious of the loss in this “updated”20 Christianity until, seeking to expand myhorizons through the study of world religions, I came (first) on the Vedanta, whereupon I found that myinterest in process theology dropped markedly, and with it my interest in Christianity until Idiscovered that its classical expressions include everything of importance I had discovered in theUpanishads. Why, then, is this loss—process theology—being inflicted on Christians? (That is astrong charge, strong enough to keep me repeating Kennett Roshi’s “I could be wrong”; even though Idon’t think I am wrong.) Because—I answer from introspection, it being a part of my former self that Iam trying to understand—theologians saw in Whitehead the prospect of reconciling religion withmodern science. This is a chancy move. As Jeremy Bernstein observed in his review of FritjofCapra’s The Tao of Physics, “to hitch a religious philosophy to a contemporary science is a sureroute to its obsolescence, [for] the science of the present will look as antiquated to our successors asmuch of nineteenth-century science looks to us now.”21 Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, focusingin its doctrine of prehensions, was modeled on (and thereby powered by) the most sophisticatedscience of its day; it followed carefully Einstein’s prescription, required by his relativity theory, thatas no coherent concept of an independently existent particle is possible, reality should be regarded asconstituted of fields whose localized pulses do not end abruptly but spread to arbitrarily largedistances with decreasing force. As this banished the spectre of clockwork mechanism, which forthree hundred years had haunted theology with its view of the world as constituted of entities whichare outside of each other in the sense that they exist independently in different regions of space (andtime) and interact through forces that do not bring about any changes in their essential natures, it was athrilling synthesis—I speak for myself; I felt it. But science keeps moving, and it now appears that theunified-field theory Einstein had hoped for is not going to happen short of another paradigm change,which would carry us beyond Einstein and Bohr, and therefore beyond Whitehead. Relativity andquantum theory proceed from such opposite premises that it seems impossible for either toaccommodate the other.22 “What is probably needed,” David Bohm writes,

is a qualitatively new theory, from which both relativity and quantum theory are to be derived as abstractions.…The bestplace to begin is with what they have basically in common. This is undivided wholeness. Though each comes to suchwholeness in a different way, it is clear that it is this to which they are both fundamentally pointing.23

Undivided wholeness sounds more like God’s simplicity (in its technical medieval sense) thanlike the time-involved creativity and discrete eternal objects Whitehead took for ultimates.

IV. Science As Symbol

It is possible that the preceding section was squandered in what Freud called “the narcissism of smalldifferences,” though I do not think so. In any case, though I have exhausted the space appropriate forthis chapter, I do not want to end without noting that there is another side to the science/theologyquestion, one that is very different and filled with possibilities that counter the pitfalls. If, instead ofrummaging through science for direct, literal clues to the nature of reality, we could outgrow thisfundamentalism and read science allegorically, we would find sermons in cloud chambers. That thedeeper science advances into nature, the more integrated it finds it, lends resonance to (though it doesnot prove) the faith claim that the same holds for being as a whole: God, who is all in all, is likewiseone. Or again, that science has found reality in its physical aspect to be incomparably more majesticand awesome than we had supposed suggests—it does not prove—that if we could see the full picturewe would find its qualitative depths to be as much beyond what we normally suppose as science hasshown its quantitative ones to be.24

And remember, we are speaking of light-years.

8

Science:The Dispute over Evolution

The preceding essay is not the only one in which science figures prominently; it would not be goingtoo far to see all of the essays save the last in this third, “Looking Around,” section of the book as aneffort to understand how, appropriately and inappropriately, science has affected our view of things.This is the only essay, however, that zones in on a specific scientific claim.

The scientific view of how we got here was the obvious choice. When, under the Romans, theJews faced dispersion, they often asked their rabbis to encapsulate the Torah for them; they needed aformula that could easily be kept in mind during those years of tribulation and disruption. RabbiAkiba’s “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” proved to be the favorite, but alternates wereproposed. The strangest of these was the one Rabbi Ben-Azzai put forward, for he nominated as themost important verse in the Bible, “This is the book of the generations of Adam.” That sounds flat bycomparison, until we remember that Adam means “man,” which makes the Bible the book of how wegot here—an account that differs markedly from the one science puts forward.

I am deeply indebted to Jonathan Wells, who holds a doctorate in development biology from theUniversity of California, Berkeley, for the accuracy of the scientific facts the essay refers to. Theessay was originally written for the 1982 colloquium on the philosophy of nature which wassponsored by the Boston University Institute for Philosophy and Religion.

Walker Percy in his Message in the Bottle points out that we do not know who we are. Thereexists in the contemporary West no coherent theory of human nature, no consensus view such asprevailed in thirteenth-century Europe, in seventeenth-century New England, or in traditionalsocieties still. Whether these views were true or false, they were viable beliefs. They animated theircultures and gave life its meaning. They were outlooks people tried to live by.

In contrast to such embracing theories, what we have today is a miscellany of notions as to whowe are. These notions do not cohere, but they do fall into two rather clearly demarcated camps. Onthe one hand is the view, backed by modern science, that the human self can be understood as anorganism in an environment, endowed genetically like other organisms with needs and drives, whothrough evolution—natural selection working on chance mutations—has developed strategies forlearning and surviving by means of certain adaptive transactions with the environment. Over andagainst this is the Judeo-Christian view that the human being was created in the image of God with animmortal soul and occupies a place in nature somewhere between the beasts and the angels. At some

point, humankind suffered a catastrophic fall, in consequence of which we have lost our way and,unlike the beasts, have become capable of sin and seekers after salvation. The clue to this secondscenario derives not from science or philosophy, but from two historical events—the Exodus and theIncarnation—which produced respectively a people, the Jews; and an institution, the ChristianChurch.

Not only do these views not mesh; they are in head-on opposition, for according to science weare the more who have derived from the less, whereas our religions teach that we are the less whohave derived from the more. In thus contradicting each other, our two views—one taught by ourschools, the other by our churches and synagogues—cancel each other out, leaving us without a clearself-image or identity. It is impossible for both views to be true, yet simply by having been born intotoday’s West, we all believe parts of both of them. Even those who have abandoned the theologicalspecifics of the religious view continue to affirm the afterglow that lingers from its light: the beliefthat human beings are endowed with certain unique properties—inherent dignity and inalienablerights—that other organisms do not possess, and that (as a consequence) the highest value ademocratic society can set for itself is respect for the sacredness and worth of the individual.

How does one live one’s life if one tries to take these two contradictory propositions seriously?The standard way is to see oneself as an organism that has evolved enough to have developed certainvalues. What is not noticed, Walker Percy concludes, is that the moment the sanctity of the individualis turned into a “value,” an act of enormous devaluation has already occurred.

An age comes to a close when people discover that they can no longer understand themselves bythe theory their age professes. For a while, its denizens will continue to think that they believe it, butthey feel otherwise and cannot understand their feelings. This has now happened to us. We continue tobelieve Darwinism, even though it no longer feels right to us. Darwinism is in fact dying, and itsdeath signals the close of our age.

My rationale for adopting a negative project for this chapter—deflating Darwinism—is this:with respect to the problem at hand (our point of origin as it bears on who we are), our need is notjust to relieve the inconsistency in our present outlook, but to do so in the right way, with the better ofthe two hypotheses triumphing. By the better hypothesis I mean the one that is closer to the truth andmore serviceable. Darwinism is obscuring what I believe to be this doubly better answer to thequestion at stake. If I could prove that we have derived from what exceeds us, I would naturally takethat direct route, but metaphysical propositions do not admit of proof, so I resort to this via negativa.Rabbis say that if we cannot believe in God, we might at least try to stop believing in idols. Less faithin the Darwinian idol might help to clear a space in which the divine might appear more regularlythan it now does.

We would be better off if we could believe that our origin is momentous, and Darwinismcounters that belief. Peter Drucker, the industrial consultant, says he never tells managers anythingthey don’t know. He gets them to see that what they have been discounting as incidental information isactually critical information. So it is here. Not being a scientist, I obviously have nothing to contributeto evolutionary theory in its technical aspects. My project takes a different turn. I want to work on theway the entire Darwinian theory looks to us, and to change that look by gestalting it in a differentway; specifically, by placing it in the context of the premises with which this paragraph began. Whenit is thus placed, my project can be visualized as a triangle to emphasize the interdependence of itsthree propositions. If any of the three legs collapses, the triangle (argument as a whole) collapses.

I derive the phrase “Great Original” from Joseph Addison’s “Ode” in The Spectator:

The spacious firmament on high,With all the blue ethereal sky,And spangled heavens, a shining frame,Their great Original proclaim.

“Great Original” here obviously refers to God, and my contention is that though Darwinismchallenges the claim that God “originated” the world and its contents, the evidence that it offers tosupport its opposite, “small origins” theory—that we have evolved from things (organisms) that areinferior to us—does not suffice to let it replace its earlier, nobler alternative. For the game ofevidence that Darwinism as a science plays is an idiosyncratic one that involves both contraction andinflation. Contraction occurs when Darwinism sees itself as answerable only to empirical evidence;other considerations, such as metaphysical ones relating to first and final causes and the intuitiveones, with which this paper will close, are discounted from the start. This reduction of the field ofevidence to which it is accountable already exaggerates its stature, and hard on its heels follows amore obvious, inflationary move. To gain acceptance in science, a working hypothesis does not needto show much in the way of proof; all it need do is stay ahead of its competitors. If its competitors areweak, the lead hypothesis can look strong without actually being so. And if it has no competitors?There was a period when the evidence turned against Darwinism conclusively; it didn’t matter—itsrating barely slipped. I refer to that pre-Mendelian moment—it extended for thirty-three years,actually—when an Edinburgh professor showed that by the mechanisms of heredity as they were thenunderstood the emergence of new species from chance variations was logically impossible. Forthrough admixture with the standard hereditary equipment of its mating partner, the strength of apromising evolutionary mutation would be reduced to one-half in its children, to one-quarter in itsgrandchildren, and so on until it vanished completely. Mendel rescinded this refutation with hisdiscovery that genes do not blend and thus become diluted, but for a third of a century, this conclusivedisproof scarcely tarnished Darwin’s star.

One is tempted to conclude with Julius Caesar that people believe what they want to believe,and there is much to this; the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wanted to believe Darwinism for itssocial implications and its prospect that progress would continue forever. But from the scientificstandpoint, there was something that was right about this tenacious clinging to a disproven theory. For

Darwinism seemed (as it still seems) to be the only possible scientific explanation for life’s originand development, so it was appropriate to see how far it could succeed. That it has not succeededenough to displace its Great Origins competitor is my conclusion, but I must first attend to thepremises that lead up to it.

1. The Great Origins thesis is inherently superiorUnderlying this first proposition, naturally, is the supposition that notions regarding origins areimportant whatever their kind. Sociologically, we see this in the search for roots that is cropping upin our highly mobile, transient society, while on a larger scale, we find it in the cosmogonic myths thatlegitimize every known culture. The care with which these myths are transmitted from generation togeneration and ritualistically rehearsed proves that more than curiosity is at stake in their origin. Theycame forward to meet a fundamental human need: the need to sense oneself as grounded in the cosmosand thereby oriented. Without orientation confusion sets in; if it persists, life loses its radar. Beingungrounded is part and parcel of this, for to be without grounding is to be adrift in ever shiftingcontexts that are unstable. The warning “not good if detached” applies not only to ticket stubs but tolife as well. But is one surmise as good as another on this subject?

It seems unlikely. Self-image affects behavior, and to see oneself as descended from noble stockis to assume that one is made of noble stuff. This in turn disposes one to behave nobly, though, ofcourse, it does not guarantee such behavior. Something like generational rub-off occurs, for wherethere is noble ancestry there are noble role models, and shoddy conduct cannot be blamed on shoddygenes. Traditional societies may have sensed such things, for Marshall Sahlins tells us that “we arethe only people who think themselves risen from savages; everyone else believes they descendedfrom gods.”1

What is difficult is to pass from everyday considerations like these to ones that are metaphysical.Two difficulties are involved. First, in our empiricistic age the metaphysical imagination has to alarge extent atrophied. The scientific account of origins (with its consistent theme of the qualitativelymore deriving from the qualitatively less) dominates our horizon to the point that it is difficult to takeseriously the opposite outlook, which, until five hundred years ago, everyone took for granted. Thesecond problem is of the opposite sort. The version of the Great Origins hypothesis that is mostbandied about today puts that hypothesis in a bad light. I refer, of course, to Creationism, whoseapostles have so muddied the waters with simplistic readings of the Scriptures and scientific claimsthat are sometimes bogus, that it is next to impossible for the Great Origins thesis to gain a fairhearing.2

Let me take this second obstacle to the Great Origins thesis first. As the precise way tocharacterize the opposite of the Darwinian thesis, I have chosen the phrase “the less from the more”for its generality and abstractness. As Adam and the animals were less than God, a literalist biblicalaccount of how we got here fits the Great Origins hypothesis, but it is far from the only one that doesso. All that the thesis requires is that we derive from Something that is superior to ourselves by everymeasure of worth we know. These transcendent objects include the ultimates of the great religioustraditions—Allah, God, Brahman, Sunyata, the Tao, the Great Spirit—as well as philosophicalultimates, provided that they exceed human beings in intrinsic worth. Clearly included, for example,is the Neoplatonic One from which beings proceed by emanation rather than creation, and theWhiteheadian God whose primordial and consequent natures conspire to work upon the world their

everlasting lure. I hope this latitude in the Great Origins thesis will keep it from being dismissed asCreationism.

The other bar to the Great Origins thesis, the poverty of the metaphysical imagination, is moredifficult to deal with. Scientists who by virtue of their sensitivity are equally humanists are rhapsodicin hymning the grandeur of the universe. Einstein referred to its “radiant beauty which our dullfaculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms.”3 What is lacking is anything resemblingAristotle’s Prime Mover, a first and final cause which in its very essence is luminously conscious andgood. And if one does not sense the decisive difference these attributes make to a worldview, this isone evidence of the atrophy of the metaphysical sense of which I speak.

How does one revive an ailing organ? Art might help if it were not itself at sea metaphysically;Walker Percy says that writers help us to understand the plight he cited, but have no remedy to offer.4

The energy that enters life through the Great Origins hypothesis does not derive solely from theheightened self-image that results from the discovery of royal pedigree. It also derives from the factthat there is in the Great Origins thesis no answer to the question of human origins that does notinclude the answer to the origin of everything. Here humankind and world conspire. They issue from asingle source, and as that source is good beyond all conceiving, it is impossible that its offspring notbe kin. In a single stroke the self/world divide, laid wide by Descartes’s mind/matter disjunction andthe slash between primary and secondary qualities, is healed.

In favoring small origins, Darwinism challenges the Great Origins thesis. I shall argue that theevidence in its favor is not sufficient for the challenge to succeed, but that demonstration is neededonly if Darwinism and the Great Origins thesis are incompatible. Are they? They are.

2. Darwinism and the Great Origins hypothesis are incompatibleDarwinism and the Great Origins doctrine cannot be squared. This needs to be argued, for it runscounter to the current drift of mainline theology which sees Darwin as assimilable. Vatican II instructsthe faithful to combine modern scientific theories with Christian doctrine. It is widely held thatevolutionary theory poses no contradiction to Catholic belief. Except for fundamentalists, Protestantsconcur, but scientists seem to feel that they are being co-opted. Darwin saw his discovery as stronglyresistant to admixture with belief in God, while Jacques Monod goes further. “The mechanism ofevolution as now understood,” he tells us, “rules out any claim that there are final causes, or purposesbeing realized. [This] disposes of any philosophy or religion that believes in cosmic…purpose.”5

Realizing that this conclusion could be colored by Monod’s personal philosophy, I turn to the entry on“Evolution” in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica for a statement that might reflect, as well as any,consensus in the field. It tells me that “Darwin showed that evolution’s cause, natural selection, wasautomatic with no room for divine guidance or design.”6

Which side is right? The question is complex, for a whole swarm of issues is involved,including the way two important intellectual currents and the institutions they represent are competingfor the mind of our age. I spent fifteen years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology withoutseeing what a few paragraphs in E. F. Schumacher’s Guide for the Perplexed showed me clearly.There is not one science. There are two, which Schumacher dubs descriptive and instructional.7

Descriptive science is as old as the human race. Pivoting as it does on careful observation andthe organization of data thus derived, no society could have survived without a touch of it, though the

quantity can vary enormously. When in the seventeenth century John Ray took the first steps towardcreating a suitable system of classifying species in the plant world, he provided a good example ofthis first kind of science—as did Carolus Linnaeus, whose naming of life forms in orderlyclassification established a context in which botanical studies could take place in a sustained fashion.Descriptive science is not confined to the study of nature; it is a part of every cognitive discipline.Even today in continental Europe, words for science tend to have this descriptive ring. Wissenschaftis an example. On the Continent, history is a science.

In the English-speaking world it is not, the reason being that here the word has come to denotemodern science, which turns on science in Schumacher’s instructional mode. Instructional sciencetakes the form: Do X, and Y will follow. In the formal, conceptual sphere, we have geometry,mathematics, and logic, where we can issue instructions that work and thereby establish proof.Equally in the empirical, material world: our hands can manipulate objects, so again we can issueinstructions as to what manipulations will achieve which ends and again establish proof. Animportant insight comes to view. Only through instructional science, which is to say, only in what wecan ourselves do, can we truly explain and prove.

Applied to evolutionary theory, this distinction gives us descriptive evolution which tries to tellus what happened in life’s ascent, and instructional evolution which takes up from there to explainhow and why it happened. The ideal of descriptive evolution would be a complete cinematographicrecord of what has occurred in life’s sojourn on this planet. We might think of it as a videotape which,accelerated enormously, PBS could run as a mind-boggling spectacular. It should be a silent film, inkeeping with the eerie silence of the fossil record from which it would be primarily derived.Darwinism, on the other hand, is instructional evolution.

Descriptive evolution is essentially the fossil record. Fossils found in the earth’s crust show thatthere have been changes in the constitution of plants and animals, and with the help of radioactive andpotassium-argon dating, these have been placed in historical sequence. Drawing primarily on thisdata, descriptive evolution weaves a story the chief features of which are: (a) that higher, morecomplex forms of life appeared later than simpler ones (much later); (b) that all organisms after theinitial self-replicating protein molecule(s) issued from parents; and (c) that all species of life on earthcan be traced back through their pedigrees to the simplest forms in which life initially appeared.Darwin contributed to descriptive evolution as just summarized, but his importance lies in hisproposal for how it all happened: through natural selection working on chance mutations. It is thisexplanatory side of his work that I am calling Darwinism in this essay.

It is at once apparent that descriptive evolution is more compatible with the Great Originshypothesis than is Darwinism, for, being silent on the question of causes, it leaves room for thepossibility that God scripted and directs the entire production; if the heavens declare the glory ofGod, why not the fossil record? If we ponder the matter, though, we can see that psychologically, ifnot logically, descriptive evolution veils God’s glory considerably.

Descriptive evolution works psychologically against the Great Origins concept. For on the onehand, though it brackets the question of how the more derives from the less, it nonetheless depicts it asso deriving. And it presents changes as occurring so gradually that nothing extraordinary seems tohappen; miracle is reduced to microscopic, incremental accretions. Because these two features ofdescriptive evolution run psychologically counter to the Great Origins thesis, it is useful to remindourselves that even descriptive evolution is not indubitable. Materially, there are more anomalies, not

to mention wide gaps, in the fossil record than the public recognizes, while formally the entirescenario rests on a postulate, uniformitarianism, which holds that the laws of nature do not change.Charles Lyell fixed this postulate into place in the 1830s with his three-volume Principles ofGeology. As a geologist put it to me recently, “It’s impossible to prove uniformitarianism; it’s just thatyou can’t be a geologist without it. We now know, as Lyell did not, that natural processes—such asrates of erosion—change. But natural laws must remain constant or geology isn’t a science.”

To his children’s question, “Who made us, God or evolution?” a British theologian, Don Cupitt,found himself answering, “Both”; which answer, as we saw, is the one that most theologians aregiving today. On reflection, though, Cupitt tells us, he concluded that his answer was diplomatic,orthodox, and shallow.8 For Darwinism does not purport to describe the instrumentalities throughwhich God works. It is the scientific account for how we and other creatures got here, and as such itmust, on pain of begging the question, proceed without recourse to anything remotely resemblingdivine intention or design. Monod has it exactly right when he writes: “The cornerstone of scientificmethod is…the systematic denial that ‘true’ knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena interms of final causes—that is to say, of ‘purpose.’”9

It is important to see exactly what is being said here. As purposes and final causes entailrealities that are greater than ourselves, Monod’s dictum translates into saying that Small Originsaccounts of how we got here are the only accounts that science—in this case Darwinism—will allow.Darwinism qualifies as being scientific because its working principles are strictly non-teleological:natural selection is purely mechanical, and the mutations on which it works arrive solely by chance.But by the same token, if Darwinism is accepted as true, the Great Origins hypothesis is replaced bythe Small Origins hypothesis.

3. In the face of its Great Origins rival, Darwinism failsI am not the first to call the claims for Darwinism into question, of course. A recent issue ofEnvironment tells us that Darwin’s ideas

have long been under successful attack not just by religious fundamentalists or “scientific creationists” but by many biologistsand such popularizers as the late Arthur Koestler and Norman Macbeth. That this will be news to most educated laypersonsand to many biologists is simply an example of cultural lag and the ability of dogmas to dominate not only religion but scienceas well.10

Macbeth’s Darwin Retried (and in its author’s eyes found wanting) has been out for over threedecades now.11 When he was asked on the November 1, 1981, PBS Nova program what hisqualifications were for writing on a scientific subject, Macbeth answered that as a professionallawyer, he considered himself an expert on evidence, and that it was in their handling of evidence thathe faulted Darwin’s defenders. A decade later, Jeremy Rifkin published his Algeny, the centralchapter of which is titled “The Darwinian Sunset.” “Our children will not think of the world in aDarwinian way,” he writes. “Darwin’s theory of evolution will be remembered in centuries to comeas a cosmological bridge between two world epochs.”12 In the most recent decade, Philip Johnsonhas spearheaded the critical attack by driving a wedge between the demonstrated facts that are citedto support Darwinism and the conclusions those facts are said to point to. “Many a slip ‘twixt the cupand the lip’ intervenes between the two,” Johnson insists, ones that are papered over with naturalisticassumptions.13

These are all lay verdicts, however, so we should go on to what the biologists themselves aresaying. It came as a surprise to me to find that Darwinism has never gained much of a hearing inwestern Europe; The New Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that “natural selection is…not widely…recognized in western continental Europe” as evolution’s cause.14 Pierre Grassé occupied for thirtyyears the chair for evolution at the Sorbonne and edited the twenty-eight volume Encyclopedia ofZoology. In his Evolution of Living Forms, Grassé has this to say:

The explanatory doctrines of biological evolution do not stand up to an objective, in-depth criticism. They prove to be either inconflict with reality or else incapable of solving the major problems involved.…Through use and abuse of hidden postulates,of bold, often ill-founded extrapolations, a pseudo-science has been created. It is taking root in the very heart of biology and isleading astray many biochemists and biologists, who sincerely believe that the accuracy of fundamental concepts has beendemonstrated, which is not the case.15

Edwin Conklin, late professor of biology at Princeton, writes, “Religious devotion…is probablythe reason why severe methodological criticism employed in other departments of biology has not yetbeen brought to bear on evolutionary speculation.”16 And in making the distinction betweendescriptive and explanatory evolution, David Raup of the University of Chicago writes: “The record.…pretty clearly demonstrates that evolution has occurred if we define evolution simply as change; butit does not tell us how this change took place, and that’s really the question.”17

This far I have contented myself with summarizing generalizations, but the time has come to turnto specifics.

A. The Fossil Record (diagrammed on page 160)The only direct evidence that we have concerning the past history of life on our planet is found infossils embedded in rock formations. Darwin admitted that in his day they did little to support histheory. “Geology…does not reveal…finely graded organic change,’’ he wrote, “and this, perhaps, isthe most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against [my] theory.”18 He trusted, ofcourse, that time would fill in the gaps, but how little it has done so Raup again attests. “We are nowabout 120 years after Darwin…and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionarytransition than we had in Darwin’s time,” inasmuch as many that were thought to be valid are nowknown not to be.19 Concerning links between species, an eerie silence prevails. “Evolution requiresintermediate forms between species,” says David Kitts, professor of geology at the University ofOklahoma, “and paleontology does not provide them.”20 The punctuated equilibrium theory—eons ofinvariance punctuated by quick (perhaps five- to fifty-thousand-year) spurts in isolated ecologicalniches—has emerged to account for the fact that, as Stephen Gould says, “phyletic gradualism [whichwould have left evidences of transitional links] is never seen in the rocks.”21 But does that theoryamount to more than justification for continuing to believe in transitional forms when we have notraces of them?

B. Population BreedingThe breeding of domestic plants and animals which had begun in England in the 1760s had byDarwin’s day produced famous breeds of Leicestershire sheep and Dishley cattle. Darwin wasimmensely impressed with this art and adopted it as a metaphor for his theory, not knowing that in theend it would work against him. For though mutations can effect changes within species

(microevolution), with respect to species as wholes they insure stability rather than change. Species-continuity is insured by a constant barrage of subtle variations that allow the species to adapt if theenvironment should change; concomitantly, species-change (macroevolution) is blocked by the law ofreversion to the mean. Beyond a certain point deviations become unstable and, instead of cresting intonew species, die out. In a typical experiment that began with fruit flies that averaged thirty-sixbristles, it was possible to raise the number to fifty-six or lower it to twenty-five, but beyond thosenumbers the lines became sterile and expired. As Luther Burbank noted early on, “There is a pulltoward the mean which keeps all living things within some more or less fixed limitations.”22 LorenEiseley is not the only one to have noted the unhappy consequences for Darwinian theory when hewrites, “There is great irony in this situation, for more than almost any other single factor, domesticbreeding has been used as an argument for evolution.”23

C. Natural SelectionDarwin saw natural selection as his central discovery; he believed that he had found in it the engineof change that had brought higher forms of life into being. But problems have arisen.

If the fittest survive, why don’t the less fit disappear? Gertrude Himmelfarb asks. If the hivebee’s efficiency in containing a maximum of honey with a minimum of wax gives it a Darwinian edge,why are bumbling, inefficient bumblebees still around?24

Natural selection makes no room for long-range considerations; every new trait has to beimmediately useful or it is discarded. How then are we to account for the emergence of complexorgans or limbs which are made up of myriads of parts that developed independently of one anotherthrough thousands of generations during which they had no utility? Stephen Gould reduces theproblem to its simplest proportions when he asks, “What good is half a jaw or half a wing?”25

If novel faculties emerge because of their adaptive edge, why are some of them overqualified forthat purpose, as Darwin and Wallace both conceded the human brain to be? Gould takes such pointsseriously, saying that it is time to free ourselves “from the need to interpret all our basic skills asadaptations for specific purposes.”26

As fitness tends to be defined in terms of survival, much of the reasoning on this topic iscircular. “Natural selection…amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave the most off-spring are those which leave the most offspring. It is a tautology,” C. H. Waddington observes,27

while Himmelfarb adds, “The survivors, having survived, are thence judged to be the fittest.”28

Finally, Darwin thought that natural selection accounts for the creativity in evolution—how lifeforms that are clearly higher emerged. Stephen Gould does not see that it does.29

D. Embryology and Vestigial OrgansI was taught that the human embryo in the course of its development in the womb rehearses the entireevolutionary sequence—in Ernst Haeckel’s catchy slogan, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Ouruseless tailbones were cited as vestigial remains of the tails our ancestors had swung from. When Imentioned this matter in presenting an early draft of this paper, a biologist expressed surprise at mybringing it up. “We haven’t taught those things in years,” he said. It turns out that what I had beentaught were incipient gills in the embryo are not gills at all, and that the coccygeal vertebrae—tailbone is a clear misnomer—are in no wise vestigial. Without the muscles they support, our pelvic

organs would drop out.

Adaptive Radiation of vertebrates showing stratigraphic abundance of the major vertebrate groupsthrough time. The dotted lines represent hypothetical lineages required by evolution to link thevarious groups together. Reproduced from Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda,MD: Adler & Adler, 1986), p. 173. A. S. Romer, Vertebrate Paleontology. Third Edition (Universityof Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 47 & 108, and G. S. Carter, Structure and Habit in VertebrateEvolution (Seattle: University of Washington, 1971), p. 9 are credited for the information the diagramcompacts.

E. BiochemistryIt was expected that detailed knowledge of the chemical differences between biological forms would

shed light on their lineages; descendants, it was thought, would be found to resemble their presumedprogenitors in biochemical makeup. This has not proved to be the case. Similarities appear amongforms that resemble one another taxonomically, i.e. structurally, but (with negligible exceptions) notbetween forms and their alleged ancestors; biochemically, “descendants” are just as likely toresemble creatures from which they could not possibly have derived. This finding has spawned agroup of “transformed cladists” who have simply given up on Darwin’s “tree of life” project ofclassifying life forms by lineal descent. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist of the British Museum,is one of their number.30

F. BiogenesisDarwin occupied himself only with the living world, but his followers extended his theory to explainhow life originated from nonlife. In the early 1950s, it was thought that experiments performed byStanley Miller and Harold Urey had shown this to be possible, but it is now recognized, first, that theatmospheric conditions in which life arose were probably prohibitively different from those in thescientists’ laboratory, and second, that the kind of amino acids that they produced—racemates—arenot the kind that can support life.

G. Mathematical ImprobabilityIt used to be thought that geological time was immense enough to allow almost anything to happen,and so it is if we are thinking of isolated events like the number nineteen turning up on a roulettewheel precisely when it is needed. Now, though, attention has turned to the extent to whichinnumerable precise components must converge, each making its appearance exactly on schedule.This is more like the number twenty-three coming up on all the tables at Monte Carlo simultaneously,followed by the numbers twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, etc., all appearing simultaneously insequence. For things like this to happen, even four billion years is insufficient.

Again a personal anecdote can make the point. At yet another presentation of this paper inprogress, it happened that the president of the International Association for Mathematical Biologywas in the audience. He did not enter into the discussion, but at its close he came forward andidentified himself. Then, very quietly, he said, “There wasn’t enough time.” It is for this reason thatFred Hoyle, Francis Crick, and others are turning to outer space, deeming it more probable that ourplanet was “seeded” with life from elsewhere than that it developed here.

This completes my sketch of some major problems relating to Darwin’s claim, but it should benoted that recent moves to recast Darwinism in cybernetic mode, as in Peter Coming’s TheSynergistic Hypothesis, do little to solve them. For though it is probably the case that a wide varietyof factors relating to interactions between cells, organisms and their behaviors, populations, species,and multispecies ecosystems converged to effect the micro-evolutionary changes that have occurred,the claim that synergistic responses to selection pressures deriving from those interactions explain theappearance of new species remains a posit only. “What is not in doubt,” says Stephen Gould, “is thefact of evolution,” or what I have called descriptive evolution. “But as to its mechanism [here calledDarwinism], there is observational evidence for natural selection [true, but not outside ofmicroevolution], but it could be false that it [Darwinism in its distinctive claim] is as strong adeterminant of evolution as we think.”31 More recent statements in which Gould associatedadaptationism with Voltaire’s joke—“Why do people have noses? To support their glasses!”—suggest

that his own confidence in it is waning. The New York Times Magazine reported that “this forty-two-year-old paleontologist is putting himself more and more at odds with orthodox Darwinism,”32 but thealternatives he is toying with—constraints imposed by developmental trends and anatomicalarchitecture—are at this stage little more than conjectures.

The point of this critique of Darwinism has been to show how little (in the way of hardevidence) has been allowed to eclipse so much (the Great Origins principle). This is the more sowhen to the paucity of firm empirical evidence we add intuitive considerations which can only belisted:

—Max Müller, according to Nirad Chaudhuri’s book Scholar Extraordinary, wrote to Darwinsaying that he found it quite possible to believe that the human physique has evolved from simplerbodies, but the idea that human language emerged from grunts and brays struck him as out of thequestion. Noam Chomsky supports him in this hunch. The module of the brain that governs linguisticability has no counterpart among the other animals; it appeared in man suddenly and in its presentform. This places the biological foundation of human language beyond the explanatory range oftwentieth-century science, Chomsky concludes—and twenty-first science as well, I add.

—Can something emerge from nothing? Can a stream rise higher than its source? When I ask mystudents these questions, they almost inevitably answer no. Yet William Bartley, the biographer andforemost interpreter of Karl Popper, tells us that the foundation of Popper’s philosophy is the claimthat something can come from nothing. What are we to make of these opposite answers? My personalreading of the matter is that Popper, having steeped his life in the philosophy of science, saw clearlythe fundamental point. Only if we grant science the counterintuitive, something-from-nothingassumption can we look to it to explain anything above the material plane.

—The going word for that something-from-nothing legerdemain is emergence, and in counteringreductionism by insisting that higher forms have ontological components that were not in theirprecursors, it looks in the right direction. But as an explanation for those novel components it isworthless; it recognizes their arrival while doing nothing to explain it. There would be nothing wrongwith this if it did not presume to give an explanation, which it does by riding analogies that arespurious. The standard one is the liquidity of water which emerges from the convergence of twogases, hydrogen and oxygen. This, though, overlooks the fact that apart from the way water looks andfeels to us (which introduces an issue the analogy finesses, namely, the emergence of sentience andawareness), its liquidity is simply a different arrangement of molecules in motion, or primaryqualities only. Nothing new in kind has appeared at all. The primary qualities have merely beenreshuffled.

ConclusionIs it impertinent for someone untrained in science to tamper with a theory as technical as evolutionhas become? Who owns this issue?

It has been my contention that more than technicalities are involved. My basic question has beenwhether we should believe that Darwinism explains how we got here, and my negative answer is

predicated on the claim that beliefs take shape on an unrestricted horizon, which, in this case,includes considerations in addition to ones that are paleobiological.

It brings to mind the story of the ill-fated sky diver who, plummeting toward earth in a parachutethat refuses to open, passes a hot-air balloonist whose blow torch won’t shut off. “Know anythingabout parachutes?” he shouts, to which the balloonist counters, “No, but what about you? Knowanything about gas stoves?” Whitehead predicted that, more than by any other factor, the future will beshaped by the way the two most powerful forces in history—science and religion—settle into relationwith each other. That relationship has been my root concern. Though I have openly registered myperception that the Darwinian parachute has not opened very far, I know no more about such devicesthan the next person. I do know something about gas stoves, here representing convictions that canmake the spirit soar. It is as Walker Percy says. Plummeting through sidereal time, we moderns underpoor acoustical conditions shout across the expanses that divide our specialties, “Know anythingabout this? About that?”

The speaker who has the best grasp of both sides of this issue is the one who most merits ourattention.

9

Society:The Relevance of the Great Religions for the Modern World

With the collapse of confidence in what might transcend the human, attention has gravitated in recentcenturies toward the human aggregate. “The magic word of modernity,” George Will tells us, “is‘society.’ ” Even in the humanities, the Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, LynneCheney, reports that “faculty members have ‘politicized’ their research and teaching.…Viewing textsas though they were primarily political documents is the most noticeable trend in academic study ofthe humanities today. The key questions are thought to be about gender, race, and class” (The NewYork Times, Sept. 13 & Oct. 5, 1988).

To argue that the importance of politics is not diminished by recognizing that it is not all-important, I reach for an address I delivered at the closing session of the Spiritual Summit Conferencethat was convened in Calcutta in October, 1968. Though to that audience I thought it important toargue for the importance of social concern, in the act of placing that concern in perspective, the otherside of the story comes through as well. Society is important, but not exhaustively important.

Religion can, of course, be irrelevant and often is. No human endeavor is immaculate, and one thattraffics in millions is bound to emerge a mixed bag. In this respect, religion is no different from othercorporate enterprises—education which quickens and represses, government which orders andrestricts. Religion has been revolutionary and conservative, prophetic and priestly, catalyst andincubus. It creates barriers and levels them, raises church budgets and raises the oppressed, makespeace with iniquity and to some extent redeems the world.

Such statements relate to the social relevance of religion, but it would be a mistake to assumethat that is the only relevance religion possesses. I propose to distinguish three great ages throughwhich humanity has passed, with an eye to what religious relevance has meant in each.

I. Three Ages in Human History

1. The first age, by far the longest, was the archaic. It lasted, roughly, up to the first millennium B.C.In this Archaic Period when humans were rousing out of animal innocence, their chief spiritualproblem was time. Lower animals are oblivious of time, for they possess neither foresight norhindsight, neither anticipation nor memory. When human beings first acquired these time-binding

faculties, they found the implications terrifying: the future, they discovered, was contingent, and thepast forever gone. Their recourse was to blink these terrors. Insofar as possible, they simply turnedtheir backs on them and denied their existence by attending to their opposite. This opposite—GreatTime—was in fact timeless. It consisted of momentous, originating acts which, their myths told them,had brought order out of chaos and established the patterns for meaningful activity: creation of theworld itself, the first planting, the first mating, each act accomplished by the gods in epic proportions.For archaic peoples, Being comprised these timeless, paradigmatic acts which were significant,secure, and impervious to time’s decay. Their religion consisted of replicating these acts through ritesthat were myth-ordained and myth-prescribed. Through these rites, they fused their lives with Being,merging them with the meaningful and the real.

Note how little ethics entered into this first, originating phase of religion. The reason is that atthis stage ethics did not pose much of a problem, little more than it does for subhuman animals.People were living for the most part in small groups, in tribes or tiny villages wherein everyone kneweveryone else and cooperated pretty much as do members of a normal family.

2. Following the terminology of Karl Jaspers, I shall call the second period the Axial Age, forduring it human history took a marked turn, a giant swing on its axis, so to speak. This is the periodthat witnessed the rise of the geniuses the world still honors: the great prophets of Israel, Zarathustrain Persia, Gautama Buddha and the Upanishadic seers in India, Lao Tzu and Confucius in China. Thisburst of religious creativity across the full arc of the civilized world—an extraordinary proliferationof prophetic genius diffused in space but condensed in time and amounting to nothing short of amassive historical mutation—this striking phenomenon has often been noted but never explained. Isubmit that it was at root the spirit’s response to a marked change in the human condition, a crisis inhistory’s development.

By the first millennium B.C.E. or shortly before, agricultural improvement led to populationexplosions and settled existence, which, in turn, meant that people were now regularly dealing withpeople outside their primary groups. As a consequence, familial feelings no longer sufficed to keepsociety intact. Perceptive souls—we call them prophets, seers, rishis, sages, magi—saw this andsummoned religion to emerge from its Archaic phase to help meet the problem.

Rites and rituals are no longer enough, they said in effect.1 You must watch how you behavetoward your fellows, for human discord can reduce life to shambles. Interpersonal relations are notthe sum of religion, but religion is stopped in its tracks if it skirts them. Yogas (spiritual techniques)must be prefaced by yamas (moral precepts), dhyana (meditation) and prajna (wisdom) by sila(ethical observances). “If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brotherhas something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to yourbrother, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5: 23-24). For “he who does not love hisbrother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (I John 4:20).

Hence the Golden Rules of the great religions: Christianity’s “Do unto others…”; Judaism’s“What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justice, love mercy…”; Jainism’s ahimsa andaparigraha; Buddhism’s metta and karuna, its “boundless heart toward all beings”; Hinduism’s“highest [yogin] who judges pleasure or pain everywhere by the same standard as he applies tohimself’ (Gita, VI,32); Islam’s man who “gives his wealth…to kinsfolk and to orphans and to theneedy and the wayfarer…who sets slaves free…and payeth the poor due”; Sikhism’s “humility to

serve”; Confucius’ human-hearted jen. These counsels of concern for the well-being of others wereone of the glories of religion during its Axial period.

3. The third great period in human history is the Modern Age, which was inaugurated by the riseof modern science in the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment in the eighteenth. For purposeshere, the Modern Age differs from its predecessors in seeing social structures as malleable. Inprevious ages, institutions—family systems, caste and class, feudalism, kingship, chief, and emperor—were regarded in much the way we regard the laws of nature; as ingrained in the nature of things.Now they are recognized as contingent. And by the same token fallible! The corollary is immense.For if society can be changed, it often should be changed, in which case its members are responsiblefor seeing to it that it is changed.

Obviously, this new perspective enlarges the scope of ethics enormously. Whereas religion’sethical dimension was minimal in the Archaic Period and interpersonal in the Axial Period, today itis both interpersonal and social, individual and collective. For to repeat: if social structures can begood or evil and are subject to human volition, people are responsible for their character.

II. Religion’s Relevance in the Three Ages

Against the backdrop of these three stages of human history, the question of religious relevancebecomes more manageable. What makes religion relevant depends on the age in question. Archaicreligion was relevant without containing much in the way of ethics at all, for ethics was not then apressing problem. But if religion had idled ethically in the Axial Period when ethics became aproblem, it would have lost step with relevance and disappeared.

Similarly today, social ethics having emerged as a new human responsibility, if religion defaultson this responsibility it will lose the relevance it has thus far managed to retain. Personal kindness isno longer enough. Institutions affect human well-being no less than do interpersonal relations. Thisbeing so, enlightened compassion calls for social responsibility as much as for face-to-face goodwill.

In a way, nothing is new here, for human well-being has always been affected by its socialmatrix. The novelty is that, brought to the realization that social institutions are to an appreciableextent humanly contrived, we now recognize our partial responsibility for them. We have reached thepoint in history where we see that to be indifferent to social institutions is to be indifferent to humanlife.

Not that religion should be converted into social action. Religion must be socially responsiblewithout equating itself with such responsibility. Moreover, it should engage society in a specific way.These qualifications are subtle, but they are important—sufficiently so as to occupy us for the balanceof this essay.

III. Eternal Religion

Let me recast in slightly different terms the three dimensions of religion which historically have

appeared successively. Archaic Religion did not focus on humanity, individually or collectively, atall. It looked beyond the human, to divine metaphysical realities from which humanity derived and inwhich it remained grounded. Religion anchored the current generation in those timeless realitiesthrough rituals which (as was noted) linked finite, ephemeral human acts to heroic paradigms thatgave them enduring substance and meaning. It was as if its rituals and their attendant myths pluggedhuman doings into timeless templates that charged them with significance and exempted them fromtime’s decay. In subsequent ages, religion articulated this eternal tie explicitly; it spoke (and continuesto speak) of immortality and of anchoring life in the divine presence and the Eternal Now. The move,though, is the same. It counters time’s vicissitudes by binding us to the eternal.

Axial Religion added interpersonal concerns to religion’s original Archaic agenda and nurturedconscience, compassion, self-knowledge, and forgiveness. In adding social responsibility to thesetwo preceding agendas, Modern Religion effects a third extension. But it must be an extension, not areplacement—everything turns on this difference. If in the Axial Period religion had relinquished itseternal concerns when it picked up on love of neighbor, it would have cashed in religion for ethics. Itdid not, of course, do this; statements like “We love, because he first loved us” (I John 4:19) and “Itis not for the love of creatures that creatures are dear, but for the love of the Soul in creatures thatcreatures are dear” (Bhidad-Aranyaka Upanishad, II, 4) make clear that the ethics of Axial Religionwas in direct touch with its religious source. Whether the social thrust of Modern Religion isgenuinely religious or only seemingly so, being in actuality indistinguishable from secular socialaction, depends on whether it represents an extension of religion’s prior, transcendent andinterpersonal concerns—love of God and love of neighbor, respectively—or has cut these lifelines.

Tracing our steps backwards through these three concerns, religion would no longer be religionif it attended only to society, for to do so would contradict its conception of the human self. A perfectsociety (if that notion makes sense) would not produce perfect selves, for the sufficient reason thathuman worth cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved, because our inner, self-creating, volitionalpole is too much a part of our nature to allow us to be manipulated: we are not automata. Given ourvulnerability, external circumstances can crush us, which is why organized religions must do whatthey can to prevent this from happening; but the opposite does not pertain. Circumstances, howeverwell contrived, cannot fulfill us because (to repeat) fulfillment cannot be conferred. By providingfood, controlling temperature, and introducing anodynes when needed, comfort can be bestowed, butnot nobility or even happiness; these must be won individually. Being aware of this fact, religion cannever rest its case with doing things for other people. Working on oneself the cleansing of the inwardparts—is always part of its agenda. (We have the dictum that it is never possible to do as much forothers as one can do for oneself; namely, save one’s own soul. The Zen version is earthier: everyonemust perform his own toilet.) Neither the agents of social action nor its beneficiaries are exempt fromthis stricture.

This is the point of Whitehead’s definition of religion as what a man does with his ownsolitariness, and why Kierkegaard gave such attention to human subjectivity. Because this inner,individual wellspring of religion provides the starting point for both of religion’s subsequentextensions—into Axial Religion’s interpersonal karuna (compassion) and caritas as defined by St.Paul in First Corinthians 13, and into Modern Religion’s further extension into social ethics—I shouldsay more about it than I thus far have. Thus far I have described it as focused on time and eternity, butother issues get drawn in; they are elusive, but terribly real. In earlier times, we could (in the West)

have named the transcendent or eternal focus of religion which we encounter in the depths of our owninwardness “God,” but in our century, the contours of that word have blurred, beyond which standsthe complicating fact that it has no exact equivalent in Afro-Asian faiths. Archaic, eternal, interiorreligion is obsessed with “why” questions, beginning with why anything exists rather than nothing. Itdeals with the individual’s stance toward his world, whether s/he feels at home in it or alienated fromit—the ways s/he belongs to it and does not belong to it but is separate from and stands over againstit, pointing thereby to an ultimate beyond it. Eternal religion grapples with the failure that in one formor another visits everyone—how we can live with ourselves and feel acceptable when in so manyways we know that we are not. Its root concern is (as I began by saying) in some way with time: howeverything can matter, as we feel in some sense it does, when in the long run it seems that nothingmatters. Running through all this is the question of meaning; how life can be meaningful when so muchof it reads like an idiot’s tale. Eternal religion knows that there are no discursive answers to thesequestions. It ranges time and space for insight—prajna, vision, a revelation which, by-passing words,will disclose directly why we exist and why the world is the way it is, in much the same way thatloving explains why we are male and female.

IV. Further Observations

Even Marxists now concede that “faith for the Christian [and by implication for Buddhists, Hindus,and the rest] can be a stimulus for social commitment,”2 a marked change from their originalcontention that religion is the opiate of the people. It would be pleasant to think that religion’stranscendent, interpersonal dimensions protect it against the special dangers to which social programsare heir—fanaticism, projection, means-ends casuistry, and discouragement—but nothing turns onthis. With such safeguards or without them, religion must now address the world.

Its social efforts differ from those of secularists primarily in their interpersonal and transcendentroots, but there is another difference: religion’s guiding social goal must be general. Images of a newheaven and a new earth, of lions lying down with lambs, of messiahs and maitreyas and swordsbeaten into plowshares are vague, but in this case savingly vague. For sharpened much further theybecome ideologies. (The prophets demanded that justice flow down like mercy, and righteousnesslike a mighty stream, but they didn’t feel it incumbent on them to design irrigation systems.)Ideologies have their uses, but sooner or later all are surprised by history. One or another may meritqualified support at a given moment, but to become tied to any would be to lose the freedom andflexibility religion needs if its social voice is to be timelessly contemporary. Probably no social goalmore specific than that every human being—child of God in theistic idiom—have an equal chance atlife’s opportunities deserves unqualified religious endorsement.

Though I have argued that religion must now include all three of the components enumerated, itwould be foolish to contend that everyone should attend to them equally. People are irreduciblydifferent; in religion, this makes for priests and prophets, for hermits and householders. It is evenappropriate that there be sects that highlight the components differently, as did Confucianism, Taoism,and Buddhism in traditional China. But in a tradition or culture as a whole, the three need to beresponsibly balanced.

V. Final Nuances

I have argued two theses: to remain relevant, religion must become socially involved; to remainreligious, such involvement must retain ties with religion’s earlier concerns. It happens that withrespect to these theses, East and West have, today, complementing strengths and weaknesses. When inMay, 1968, the Ceylon Daily News quoted the eminent Buddhist authority Dr. Walpola Rahula asasserting that development of a sustaining economy for all of the people is as much a religious duty asany other, and that “cultivating a farm properly is better than building many temples,” it showed thatAsian religions are not unmindful of the need to involve themselves deeply in their adherents’ struggleto pull themselves out of the straightjacket of hunger, underemployment, and indebtedness. ThroughoutAsia, swamis, monks, and laymen are changing the image of Hinduism and Buddhism. Religiousleaders of many stripes write tracts on problems of modernization, encouraging laymen and fellowleaders alike to participate in economic and social development. In much of Asia, we seem to bewitnessing something like a Protestant Reformation in its Weberian sense. If Max Weber were livingtoday, he would have to revise his judgment of the Asian religions; he would find “worldlyasceticism” beginning to operate in them, too, to break barriers to economic, social, and politicalmodernization. But the qualifying phrase “beginning to operate” is important. By virtue of their strongprophetic heritage, and even more because industrialization has shown them how much society can bechanged, Western religions can still help Afro-Asian faiths to see the necessity of social activism.Meanwhile, Asian religions can alert those in the West to the danger that threatens them, the danger offocusing exclusively on society, neglecting religion’s interpersonal, transcendent roots, and becomingin consequence unrelievedly secular. In “Up to Our Steeples in Politics,” two ministers chide theirfellow Christians for swallowing the prevailing American assumption that “the political order is theonly source and authority to which we can and ought to repair for relief from what ails us. Politicshas become the end. We have been gulled into believing that whatever ails us can be curedexclusively by political and social nostrums.”3

“If there be East and West/It is not wisdom,” sang that delightful Tibetan saint Milarepa. In viewof what East has to learn from West today about religious relevance, and West from East aboutreligious relevance, his words acquire new meaning.

VI. Historical Update

In the decades since this essay was written, the fate of our planet has emerged as yet another humanresponsibility, its newest frontier. Consequently, the picture that was sketched above should now beemended to read as follows: Religion began in the individual’s direct relationship with thetranshistorical and ultimate—God by whatsoever name. From this inviolate starting point andcontinuing center, it has proceeded to shoulder, successively, concern for interpersonal relations andsociety’s institutions and structures. To live up to its calling, it must now add to these agendas,concern for other species and life’s sustaining environment.

Part Four

THE WAY OUT

Sensibilities differ, and mine (clearly) are better tuned to the past than to the future. I see theoptimism of our New Age Aquarians cancelled by the pessimism of our doomsday Cassandras andfind myself hamstrung between them. If I could have my way, I would redirect unopened to itsopposite numbers the mail that reaches me from both camps. Let them fight it out while I hold theircoats, for I cannot detect a futuristic gene in my makeup.

Obviously, then, the word beyond in this book s title does not portend prediction. This finalsection will not crystal-ball the future by trying to foresee what the ethos of the twenty-firstcentury will look like. As for what it should look like, this has already been proposed; our hopelies in returning to an outlook, which, in its broad outlines, is carried in the bloodstream of thehuman race.

The first two essays in this closing section begin by reviewing the strictures the Modern andPostmodern mind-sets impose against such a return—stricture being defined (in the Oxford EnglishDictionary) as “a morbid contraction of some canal or duct in the body”—and proceed from thereto suggest what an outlook released from those strictures might look like. “The SacredUnconscious” asks how the human self might appear if seen in its full stature, while “TheIncredible Assumption” encapsulates the thesis of the book as a whole and rounds it off with aflourish.

10

Beyond the Modern Western Mind-Set

In “Excluded Knowledge,” chapter 4 of this volume, I argued that worldviews arise fromepistemologies, which in turn are generated by the motivations that control them. To summarize thatargument, in the seventeenth century, Europe hit on an epistemology (empiricism, the scientificmethod1) that augmented its control dramatically—over nature to start with, but who knew where suchcontrol might eventually reach? This increase in our power pleased us to the point that we gave thisway of knowing right of way. And with that move, the die was cast with respect to worldview.Empiricism proceeds through sense knowledge, and that which connects with our senses is matter. Ido not say that the worldview this epistemology has generated is materialism (the view that nothingbut matter exists), for our thoughts and feelings are, on the one hand, too conspicuous to be deniedand, on the other, too different from what we experience matter to be, to be reduced to it. It is safer todub our modern Western worldview naturalism, this being defined as the view that (a) nothing thatlacks a material component exists, and (b) in what does exist the physical component has the final say.

It is ironic that the science that lured us into this worldview now seems to be abandoning it. Witheach successive probe, matter had been growing more ethereal, even before Einstein discovered thatmass and energy are convertible. What this energy is, no one quite knows. If a thimbleful of vacuumcontains more energy than all the atomic energy in the universe,2 it cannot be less powerful than whenit is impounded in mass; but as the reference to vacuum emphasizes, in its free state it seems lesssubstantial. Priestly and Boscovich argued early on that Newton’s acceptance of the Greek view thatatoms are impenetrable was simple-minded; they are better conceived as mathematical pointssurrounded by fields of forces that repel up to a point and then attract with the inverse square of thedistance. Now that we have split atoms we know that Priestly and Boscovich were wrong; atoms dohave size. But their contention may still hold for electrons. Some current experiments suggest that theyhave a finite size, others that they do not. If something has no size, or no definite position as in thecase of particles before they are subject to position measurements, are they still matter? The messagethat reaches us from frontier physics seems to be that the further we track matter toward its causalorigins, the more it sheds the attributes it wears in the “middle region” of size that our senses andinstruments register, until at some vanishing point on the horizon it seems to drop these attributesaltogether to becoming something we can scarcely guess—disappearing, perhaps, into David Bohm’simplicate order.3

This ghostly writing has been on the wall for more than a century, but it has not shaken ournaturalism, which has entered our new century more entrenched, if anything, than it was. This isbecause matter remains what we can get at and control. The problem lies deeper than wilfulness—

wanting to have our way over nature—for even our search for disinterested truth is drawn tonaturalism and empiricism. Control includes, importantly, the controlled experiment, and this, morethan any other form of validation, inspires confidence. Bertrand Russell’s mid-century BBCpronouncement that “what science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know” is absurd as it stands, but ifwe amend it to read “cannot collectively know for sure,” it becomes less so. Propositionalized, thisintroductory point can be indicated as follows:

Matter is that which (with whatever required amplification) registers on our senses.

Our senses are where our worlds overlap.

The parts of our worlds that overlap are the parts we trust most, for we are social creatures: down isolation’s path liesmadness.

It is all so plausible. To restate the point only slightly:

Seeing is believing; touching is truth (an old American proverb).

Science’s extension of our seeing and touching has augmented our power and enabled us to solve certain problemsspectacularly.

With the collectivizing of society we look increasingly to government to solve our problems, while the government relies onscience to help it do so.

Everywhere, accent falls on the sense domain. It would be surprising if naturalism were not ourworldview and empiricism our favored noetic probe.

But problems abound. “Our society is not working well and all signs indicate it will work lesswell in the future,” sociologist Robert Bellah told the Woodstock symposium for which this essaywas initially written. We need to look at our social problems, but first I should describe moresystematically the outlook that contributes to them.

I. What the Modern Western Mind-Set Is

I think I see more clearly now than when I wrote either “Excluded Knowledge” or the book out ofwhich that essay derived, Forgotten Truth, what the Modern Western Mind-Set (hereafter MWM) is.The clue to it can be stated in a single sentence: An epistemology that aims relentlessly at controlrules out the possibility of transcendence in principle.4 By “transcendence” I mean something that isbetter than we are by every measure of value we know and some that elude us. To expect atranscendental object to appear on a viewing screen wired for an epistemology that aims at controlwould be tantamount to expecting the melody of a song to issue from a typewriter. We can “put natureto the rack,” as Bacon advised, because it is inferior to us; possessing (in its elemental parts at least)neither mind nor freedom in the genuine sense, these parts can be pushed around. But if things that aresuperior to us exist, they are not going to fit into our controlled experiments, any more than self-consciousness or advanced forms of abstract thinking would fit into (and hence be brought to light by)experiments wood-chucks hypothetically might devise. It being as impossible for us to acquire“effective knowledge” (see p. 88-89 above) over things that transcend us as it is to nail a drop ofmercury with our thumb, an epistemology that drives singlemindedly toward effective knowledge is

not going to allow transcendent realities to exist.5It follows that in the modern West, accounting can proceed only from the bottom up—from

inferior to superior, from less to more. Chronologically and developmentally, the more comes afterthe less; causally, it comes out of the less, the only other determining principle allowed being chance,which of course is a nonprinciple, the absence of a principle. Even when the higher has appeared, thethrust is to understand and interpret its workings in terms of the lower.

The name for this mode of explanation is reductionism,6 and the growth of the MWM can becorrelated with its advance. For Newton, stars become machines. For Descartes, animals aremachines. For Hobbes, society is a machine. For La Mettrie, the human body is a machine. ForPavlov and Skinner, human behavior is mechanical.

How many boxes,How many stars;How long, O Lord,Till they open the bars.7

This reductionistic momentum has not abated. Beginning with consciousness, we find DanielDennett telling us that "materialism in one form or another is the reigning orthodoxy amongphilosophers of mind”8 and Carl Sagan saying in his The Dragons of Eden that his “fundamentalpremise about the brain is that its workings—what we sometimes call ‘mind’—are a consequence ofits anatomy and physiology and nothing more.”9 On our way from psychology to biology we crosssociology, where attempts to explain human behavior in terms of continuities with lower forms of lifehave spawned a vigorous subdiscipline, sociobiology. As this is currently one of the liveliestcrossdisciplinary subjects on university campuses, I shall reserve it for separate treatment and passon to biology. “Biologists,” Harold Morowitz, professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry atYale tells us, “have been moving relentlessly toward…hard-core materialism.”10 Francis Crick,codiscoverer of DNA, agrees: “The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is to explain allbiology in terms of physics and chemistry.”11 Going back to Morowitz: As “physiologists study theactivity of living cells in terms of processes carried out by organelles and other subcellular entities,the study of life at all levels, from social to molecular behavior, has in modern times relied onreductionism as the chief explanatory concept.”12 In nonlife, too, we may add; in geology, forexample, the formations and properties of minerals are described using the features of the constituentcrystals. To close the loop by returning to the top of the ladder, we find that not just mind in generalbut its finest achievements are approached from below. Ethnocriticism has emerged as the attempt tounderstand works of art in terms of animal behavior. A sample on my desk proposes to shed light onthree literary classics—Moliere’s The Would-be Gentleman, Diderot’s Rameau s Nephew, andZola’s Germinal—by showing that “play” serves the same function in these works as it does in theanimal kingdom. “Culture has to do the same job that instinct had been doing.”13

This spot-check shows how widely the reductionistic approach is invoked, but I promised to saysomething about sociobiology. So let me conclude this section on what the MWM is with a quick lookat the way reductionism proceeds in its province.

The Naked Ape and The Territorial Imperative are discounted for the glib way they transposedraw, isolated data from one species to another, but their search for biological roots of human behavior

continues to be pushed to the hilt. Whether through Pavlov’s dogs, Skinner’s pigeons and rats, orLorenz’s greylag geese, the hope everywhere is to discover continuities, for only in lower registersare explanations for our basic propensities available. Piaget details continuities in play14 and speech,seeing the latter as deriving from structures of thought that have their roots in sensorimotormechanisms that are deeper than linguistics.15 John Bowlby’s fifteen-year, three-volume studyAttachment and Loss is a detailed effort to bridge the gap between innate patterns of attachment inmammals and the attachment/loss complex in the human baby. Let me be clear: insofar as such studiessimply indicate traits we share with other life forms, they do no harm and indeed some good, for untilrecently the modern world has made too much of the human/ subhuman divide. And there are practicallessons to be learned from the similarities. Bowlby’s findings on the crucial role of early emotionalattachments in the development of life forms generally, for example, might induce us to pay moreattention to this area as we relate to our own children. If his study had concluded simply that “thebasic structure of man’s behavioral equipment resembles that of infrahuman species,” there could beno objection. What must be watched is the sentence that follows, where he moves from theobservation that “the early form is not superseded” to the inference that “it [the infrahuman form]shall determine the overall pattern.”16 Here the inferior-causes-superior assumption emerges in broaddaylight.

It is Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson, though, who (more than any other single scientist) movedsociobiology onto the pages of The New York Review of Books and made it a lively public topic, sohis views deserve a paragraph or two in their own right. Like other sociobiologists, he draws on datafrom life forms generally to reason that human behavior, including actions and choices traditionallyexplained in terms of idealism and disinterested love of others, is ultimately to be understood asgenetically determined. Even when we behave “nobly,” we are in fact responding to geneticconditioning that moves us to seek our own interests or those of our kinship group.17

Wilson divides altruism into two kinds. Soft-core altruism looks like it is directed toward thewelfare of others but actually redounds circuitously to its agent’s benefit. Hardcore altruism islikewise disguised self-interest, but here the interested agent is not the individual organism, who mayeven sacrifice his life; it is the species whose will prevails. From the species’ point of viewindividuals exist merely to produce genes and serve as their temporary carriers: “The organism isonly DNA’s way of making more DNA.”18 As mutual aid between its members helps a species tosurvive, genes that induce the hypothalamus and limbic systems of the brain to entertain warm feelingsfor one’s fellows have a “Darwinian edge” and turn out to be winners. This is why we lay down ourlives for our friends;19 our genes prompt us to do so.

While the West’s “brain,” which for present purposes we can equate with the modern university,rolls ever further down the reductionistic path, other centers of society—our emotions, for example,as they find expression through our artists; and our wills, as evidenced in part by rise in crime andsenseless vandalism—protest. These other centers of our selves feel that they are being dragged,kicking and screaming, down an ever-darkening tunnel. We need to listen to their protests, for theyforce us to ask if it is possible to move toward a worldview which, without compromising reason orevidence in the slightest, would allow more room to the sides of our selves that our currentworldview constricts.

II. The Need for a Different Outlook

When individuals suffer the loss of something that implicates their sense of self—a spouse, a child,whatever it is that gives their life its focus and meaning—they grow ill; not invariably, but in greaterproportion. They become more prone to cancer, for one thing. Here is a clear and direct causal flowfrom mind to matter. In dynamics, it parallels exactly the way hypnosis can remove warts, andplacebos cause the brain to secrete more pain-relieving endorphins. In all these cases, a mentalchange effects a bodily one. But the MWM does not know what to do with mind; Barbara Brown tellsof a symposium in which a scientist reacted to the suggestion that the mind is emerging as a new toolfor medicine by roaring to the audience, “Talking about mind will set medicine back fifty years!”20 Weunderstand something of how the brain works, and, yes, through depth psychology something of howthe mind works, too. But when it comes to infusing the mind with motivation and meaning, the MWMis helpless.

In itself this can be excused, since anyone who claimed to have techniques for such infusionwould be a charlatan. What is not attractive is the way the MWM works to erode the meaning livesalready have. D. and C. Johnson report a pattern of disorder among Sioux Indians called tawatl yesni, “totally discouraged.” The syndrome involves feelings of helplessness and thoughts of death:“There is no way out.…There’s nothing he can do.”21 Conditions on the Dakota reservationsdoubtless go a long way toward accounting for this syndrome, but it would be naive to think that thenear collapse of the Native American worldview is not also a factor. The six-volume Handbook ofCross-Cultural Psychology, which includes the Johnsons’s study, illustrates how the MWMfacilitates this collapse.22 If the Sioux feels himself to be in touch with higher forces (it tells us), thisis because his “reality bounds are not as firmly established as is the case in certain Westernsocieties.”23 If he senses his life to be in the hands of a higher power—well, this “actually serves auseful function in alleviating the stress of life.”24 The clinical, patronizing term for this function is, ofcourse, compensation.

The maladies in our personal lives have become psychological and so have moved into an areawe have abandoned. That psychology courses remain the most popular college electives andPsychology Today is a booming success does not counter this observation. As the passage onreductionism in the preceding section indicates, we have abandoned the mind by converting to effortsto understand it in terms of things other than itself and lower than itself.25

The consequences of this abandonment for our civilization as a whole are difficult to assess.Who is to tell us? Let me opt this time around for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, focusing on his 1978commencement address at Harvard University.26 As an exile, he is not likely to downgrade us in favorof Soviet Russia; he sees socialism of any type and shade as leading to a total destruction of thehuman spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. But as an outside observer he may be able to seeus more objectively than we see ourselves. And what he sees in the West today is “spiritualexhaustion.”27

How short a time ago the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe. It all seemed anoverwhelming success: Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden thetwentieth century brought the clear realization of this society’s fragility.28

If Solzhenitsyn saw only political factors as responsible for this twentieth-century reversal, Iwould not be quoting him here. As it is, his diagnosis points directly to the concern of this essay:

How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turns and losses of directionin its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its proclaimed social intentions,hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundations of thought in modern times. I refer to theprevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Ageof Enlightenment.29

Clearly, Solzhenitsyn is referring to what I am calling the Modern Western Mind-Set. Heidentifies this mind-set as “rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed andpracticed autonomy of man from any higher force above him.”30 If superior forces are not allowed—current epistemology has no way to register them, I have argued—then human life has no alternativebut to appear autonomous. If we are surprised to find Solzhenitsyn blaming this presumed autonomyfor the fact that the Western world has lost its civic courage—“a fact which cannot be disputed is theweakening of human personality in the West,” he tells us31—it is because, mechanists that we havelargely and unconsciously become,32 we assume that if superior forces exist they would tyrannize; wetake their absence to be liberating. It seems not to occur to us that such forces might empower us.Submission (in Arabic, Islam) was the very name of the religion that surfaced through the Qur’an, yetits entry into history occasioned the greatest political explosion the world has known. If mention ofthis fact automatically triggers our fears of fanaticism, this simply shows us another defense ouragnostic reflex has erected against the possibility of there being something that, better than we are inevery respect, could infuse us with goodness as well as power, were we open to the transfusion. It isusually said that the Copernican revolution humbled man by displacing him from the center of theuniverse, but this spatial dislodgment was nothing compared with the arrogance that followed in itswake, the arrogance of assuming that nothing exists that quite equals ourselves. For is it not we whoride the crest of evolution’s advance? And what source of worth is there save evolution? For theMWM the question is rhetorical.

Mention of the individual and collective problems that the MWM abets has its place, but to seeka different outlook for the purpose of allaying them will not work. For this understandable (but in theend poorly conceived) motivation reinforces three assumptions of the very mindset it seeks toreplace.

The first of these is the assumption that history can be controlled. (That preoccupation withcontrol again.) Do X, and Y will follow; adopt a different worldview, and a better world will result.Realistically, there seems to be little evidence that history can be constructively controlled, thoughour destructive power might increase to the point where a madman could end it summarily.

Working hand in glove with this assumption that history can be controlled is a second: theassumption that happiness can be bestowed. Heirs to any better world we might create would behappier than we are—this is what “better world” means—so in creating such a world we would handhappiness to those who are born into it. But this is not how life works. Comfort can be handed to usinasmuch as physical discomforts, at least, can be alleviated from without; if we are hungry, food canbe given us; if we are in pain, anodynes can be provided. Happiness, though, is different. Happinesscannot be bestowed from the outside or passively received from within. It must be won. It follows, as

I have said before, that it is impossible to do as much for another as one can do for oneself—saveone’s soul, for example, however one wishes to parse that phrase. If the phrase sounds sanctimonious,we can substitute the Zen variant: “No one can go to the bathroom for you.”

The third dubious assumption underlying the “better world” rationale for a new outlook is thenotion that truth is instrumental.33 Here again the Prometheanism of modernity comes squarely toview: truth is seen as what will take us where we want to go. In the punchy formula of itsdistinctively modern, pragmatic definition, truth is what works. As a partial truth, this isunexceptionable; the pragmatic attitude is an appropriate part of life, the yang part of its yin/yangwhole—we were not born for idleness. But to make it the whole of life, and the version of truth itsponsors the whole of truth, is a trap so obvious that it took the bait of science’s success to lure usinto it. Truths in the plural are indeed instrumental; they can and should be chosen for ends we have inmind. But with truth in the singular—a person’s or a people’s final surmise as to the way things are—it is otherwise. Truth in this final, last-ditch sense is like love. If one loves for any reason save thebeloved’s intrinsic lovableness, it is not love. Comparably, to hold X to be true for any reason savethat in fact it is so, is a contradiction in terms. Suppose that to the observation that “all men must die”the response were to be, “But surely that can’t be true, for it makes people sad and fatalistic.” Tosuspect that one is holding a belief for any reason save that it is true is to undermine it immediately.

“There is no right higher than that of the Truth,” a maxim from India reminds us. It follows thatwe owe it to the truth to accept it; metaphysics may not be moralized. Truth has no obligation toaccommodate itself to us; it is we who must fashion ourselves to it. The appropriate reason forchanging our outlook is not to create a better world or save the one we have. It is to see more clearlythings as they are. All other considerations are secondary.

III. The Approach to a Revised Outlook Through Logic

Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa. A number of years ago, the frozen carcass of amountain leopard was found near its 19,565 foot snowclad summit. No one seems to know what itwas doing at that altitude.

Perhaps it was curious. We have seen that no prudential reason for changing our mind-set willdo; in the end we must want a better one solely for the more accurate view it affords. But how can animproved outlook be acquired? To move from captivity toward a freedom we have yet to understandmay be the most difficult task the mind can set for itself.

Let us begin with purely logical possibilities. Being no more than possibilities these will notpersuade—that they are possible does not mean that they are true. But even to entertain alternatives tothe MWM is a step toward loosening its hold on us, and if we can show that they are not inherentlyunreasonable, this will be an even longer step. It is as if, faced with a stake that has been driven deepinto the ground, we begin in this section to rock it back and forth to loosen the hard earth around it.Not until the next section will we try to pull it up.

In section one we saw that exercise of newly discovered ways of controlling nature establishedan epistemology that produced the MWM. It follows that if we were to approach the world with intentother than to control it, it would show us a different guise. The opposite of the will-to-control is thewish-to-participate—a genuine desire to accent embracing yin over abrasive yang so that domination

will not preclude partnership or assertiveness stymie cooperation. Such an alternative starting pointwould generate a whole new sequence, which (adapting for present purposes the diagram that wasintroduced in connection with theology on p. 131) contrasts with that of the MWM on the facing page.

The payoff of the revised starting point would be an ampler view of reality, and as it turns out toinclude things that are superior to us, “transcendence” is a fitting name for it. Its greater inclusivenessgives it a starting edge over the MWM, for the fact that every advance in science’s understanding ofnature has shown it to contain more than we had suspected suggests that a generous ontologicalvision, too, stands a better chance of being right than does a paltry one. But I leave that as no morethan a passing observation. The trickiest link in the right-hand chain is its epistemology. Refusing toaccept as truth’s final arbiter the controlled experiment (or even objectivity, the consensusrequirements of which push it relentlessly, as we have seen, toward sense-verificational empiricism),this alternate epistemology is faced with the problem of distinguishing between veridicaldiscernments and ones that are deceptive. It is not within the scope of this essay to develop thisalternative model systematically. I shall refer to it occasionally in what follows, but I introduce itmainly to limber up our imaginations—to keep them supple against an ossifying shell that threatens tobecome so strong that only the crowbar of dire historical events could break it.

There is another way to show that the MWM is not the only way to look at the world. Even if weaccept the modern world’s penchant for control, we face a choice, for that road quickly forks. Controlover what—the world or ourselves? More than once before I have referred to Ernest Gellner’s reportthat for the MWM knowledge must be “effective” if it is to qualify as “genuine” (see again p. 97above). But effective for what? For changing the objective, external world, or things within ourselves——the dispositions and predilections that constitute our characters and make us the persons we are?As self-transformation was not what interested the founding fathers of the MWM—Bacon’s“knowledge is power” was not aimed at power for self-improvement—this mindset has not proved tobe sophisticated in handling that side of the question. It does not have a great deal to say on how wemight break out of our self-centeredness and relate lovingly to the world at large. Secretly, it maywonder if there is much to say on this topic; as evidence, note the inverse ratio between prestige andattention to self-change in academic departments of psychology as we pass from experimental andcognitive psychology to clinical psychology, then humanistic psychology, and then transpersonalpsychology. When the MWM has its way completely, as in the deterministic behaviorism of B. F.Skinner, self-change is not even admitted as a possibility.

This has produced a paradox. Out of the practical side of our mouths we continue to urge peopleto exercise their freedom and take responsibility, fearing that if they do not our society may come

apart at the seams; Solzhenitsyn is not alone in warning of "spiritual exhaustion.” Meanwhile, out ofthe theoretical side of our mouths we serve notice on these attributes and place them in jeopardy. Inthe natural sciences, where Skinner’s model of man obviously belongs, and where Freud hoped hiswould eventually find its place, human beings are not free at all;34 Heisenberg’s indeterminacyprinciple has not made the slightest difference here. As for the social sciences, they remain dedicatedto explaining human behavior in terms of stimuli that provoke it. (Is the victim the murdered man orthe man who murdered him, the latter having been victimized by society?) Even in the humanities,according to the latest avant-garde literary movement, it is not man who speaks; rather, it is languageand, beneath it, matter that speak through him—I am referring to Deconstructionism as headed byFoucault and Derrida. Everywhere the individual subject is devalorized in favor of contexts that callthe tunes and pull the strings. It is what comes our way that is accented, not what we do with it.

Living as we do in a civilization that prides itself on using everything at its disposal—itsresources, its invention, every scrap of information its computers can deposit in their data banks—itis not idle to ask if our most valuable unused resource may not be the capacity of persons to recognizethemselves as responsible agents; selves who ask not that the world deliver things into their laps, butthat it provide a matrix for their moral and spiritual development—structures on which character canclimb if it resolves to do so. There is a knowledge that is effective for this kind of climbing, but likepoetry in the MWM, it is an outcast knowledge. For as Allan Wheelis has written:

Among the sophisticated, the use of the term “will power” has become the most unambiguous badge of naivete. Theunconscious is heir to the prestige of will. As one’s fate formerly was determined by the will, now it is determined by therepressed mental life. Knowledgeable moderns put their backs to the couch and in so doing may fail to put their shoulders tothe wheel. As will has been devalued, so has courage; for courage can exist only in the service of the will. In ourunderstanding of human nature we have gained determinism: lost determination.35

IV From Logic to Imagery

Logic can show us that if we were to approach the world with an eye to embracing rather thancontrolling it, or asking how it might school us rather than serve us, it would reveal a different guise.But what that guise would be it cannot say. For this latter report, insight is required. And insight, asDavid Bohm has noted,

announces itself in mental images. Newton’s conception of gravity and Einstein’s notion of the constant speed of light cameto them as perceptions, as images, not as hypotheses or conclusions drawn from logical deduction. Formal logic is secondaryto insight [via images] and is never the source of new knowledge.36

To add a third example to the two Bohm mentions, the image of a randomly branching tree notonly crystallized Darwin’s theory of natural selection but guided him through his successiveformulations of it. His notebooks show him drawing it repeatedly, lavishing on it a care forrepresentation and detail that shows clearly his need to steep his mind in the image if he were towring from it everything it had to offer.37

So I, too, reach for an image that picks up with our realization that there is a different world thatawaits discovery and moves us toward picturing what that world might be like. The one I chooseappears in a wise and beautiful book by Gai Eaton, The King of the Castle (from which the opening

sentence of my preface was also drawn), and I quote it in full:

Let us imagine a summer landscape, bounded only by our limited vision but in truth unbounded; a landscape of hills andvalleys, forests and rivers, but containing also every feature that an inventive mind might bring to thought. Let us suppose thatsomewhere in this measureless extension a child has been blowing bubbles for the sheer joy of seeing them carried on thebreeze, catching the sunlight, drifting between earth and sky. And then let us compare all that we know of our world, theearth and what it contains, the sun, the moon and the stars, to one such bubble, a single one. It is there in our imaginedlandscape. It exists. But it is a very small thing, and in a few moments it is gone.

This, at least, is one way of indicating the traditional or—taking the word in its widest sense—the religious view of ourworld and of how it is related to all that lies beyond it. Perhaps the image may be pursued a step further. The bubble’s skinreflects what lies outside and is, at the same time, transparent. Those who live within may be aware of the landscape in quitedifferent ways. Those whose sight is weak or untrained may still surmise its existence and, believing what they are told byothers who see more clearly, have faith in it. Secondly, there are some who will perceive within the bubble itself reflections ofwhat lies outside and begin to realize that everything within is neither more nor less than a reflection and has no existence inits own right. Thirdly, as by a miracle of sight, there will be a few for whom transparency is real and actual. Their visionpierces the thin membrane which to others seems opaque and, beyond faith, they see what is to be seen.38

The balance of this essay touches on several points this image raises, but before I proceed tothem let me enter a covering observation. It is not possible to adjudicate between contending outlooksobjectively, but it is possible to say which is the more interesting. And on this count, Eaton’s imagewins over the MWM hands down, for it allows for everything in the latter and vastly more besides.Specifically, it directs us toward a reality whose qualitative reaches outstrip what the MWM discernsin the way that the latter’s quantitative features—the size of the universe it sees, and its othercountable features—exceed what Ptolemy had in mind.

V. The Image Explored

Remembering that we are tracking truth not for its practical consequences but for its intrinsic worth,while expecting that each turn in the road will open onto vistas more interesting than the ones before,I proceed now to touch on five points latent in the image I have chosen as guide. The first relates toour ability to see beyond the obvious.

1. The Possibility of CertitudeLast spring, I received a letter from a young man who had been reading the book in which the image Iam working with appeared. “When at one point the author spoke of ‘the inrush of the Real,’ “ hewrote, “I felt that happening to me.”

This is an important experience. The word inrush implies confidence, while the capitalization ofthe word Real indicates that it pertains here to matters that are important.

There is no way that the MWM can validate both those points.39 Karl Popper spoke for thatmind-set when he opened a colloquium at M.I.T. several years ago by saying, “Were it not forscience, the skeptics would win hands down.” Humanists tend to concur. In science we can verifyhypotheses; elsewhere we must remain in doubt.

Meanwhile, we must live, and this calls for choices and guidelines for making them, ones weconsider dependable. It is no use to play games with oneself here, pretending that something is truewhile knowing that in all likelihood it is not,40 but as I am trying to steer clear of prudential

considerations I shall not dwell on this impasse. Time is better spent on why we think rationalitydrives toward skepticism, to see if we have that point straight.

There are times that visit us all when we feel at sea about everything. T. S. Eliot described themwell when he wrote:

The circle of our understandingIs a very restricted area.Except for a limited numberOf strictly practical purposesWe do not know what we are doing;And even, when you think of it,We do not know much about thinking.What is happening outside of the circle?And what is the meaning of happening?What ambush lies beyond the heatherAnd behind the Standing Stones?Beyond the Heaviside LayerAnd behind the smiling Moon?And what is being done to us?And what are we, and what are we doing?To each and all of these questionsThere is no conceivable answer.41

When these states come over us they must be respected: faced honestly and stayed with, to learnfrom them what we can. What is not required is the use of intelligence to glorify (and in certainversions of existentialism, romanticize) these states as if they constitute the acme of humanauthenticity rather than the mental counterpart of the common cold, or in severe instances the flu, towhich we periodically succumb. To level the sharpest charge possible, the relentless championing ofrelativism, which in its cultural, historical, psychological, social, or existential form underlies allcontemporary skepticism, is in the end naive.

Relativism sets out to reduce every kind of absoluteness to a relativity while making an illogicalexception for its own case.42 In effect, it declares it to be true that there is no such thing as truth; that itis absolutely true that only the relatively true exists. This is like saying that language does not exist, orwriting that there is no such thing as script. Total relativism is an incoherent position. Its absurditylies in its claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared aloneto be possible.

Relativism holds that one can never escape human subjectivity. If that were true, the statementitself would have no objective value; it would fall by its own verdict. It happens, however, thathuman beings are quite capable of breaking out of subjectivity; were we unable to do so we wouldnot know what subjectivity is. As was noted in chapter 2, a dog is enclosed in its subjectivity, theproof being that it is unaware of its condition, for, unlike a man or a woman, it does not possess theself-consciousness that makes objectivity possible.

If Freudian psychology declares that rationality is but a hypocritical cloak for repressed,unconscious drives, this statement falls under the same reproach; were Freudianism right on thispoint, it would itself be no more than a front for id-inspired impulses. There is no need to run throughthe variations of relativism that arise from other versions of psychologizing, historicizing,

sociologizing, or evolutionizing. Suffice it to say that few things are more absurd than to use the mindto accuse the mind, not just of some specific mistake but in its entirety. If we are able to doubt, this isbecause we know its opposite; the very notion of illusion proves our access to reality in some degree.

Our minds were made to know, and they “flourish”—no one has said this better than Aristotle—when they work meaningfully at that function. They need not be overweening nor claim omniscience;indeed, one of the important things they can know is their place. But that place exists, and it is notconfined to the laboratory. To see, as E. F. Schumacher reminded us shortly before his death, that“only those questions which cannot be answered with [laboratory] ‘precision’ have any realsignificance”43 is the first step toward knowledge about those questions themselves.

The most unnoticed reason for current skepticism is our assumption that earlier ages weremistaken. If their outlooks were erroneous, it stands to reason that ensuing eras will show ours to bemistaken, too; so runs this argument, which is so taken for granted that it is seldom even voiced. But ifwe could see that our forebears were not mistaken—they erred in details, but not in their basicsurmises, which were so much alike that in Forgotten Truth I referred to them as “the humanunanimity”—a major impediment to confidence in our global understandings would be removed. Thenext step would be to separate the reliability of our knowledge from questions of omniscience, tocounter the suspicion that if we cannot know everything, what we do know must be tainted. I need notknow the position of San Francisco relative to everything in the universe, much less what space andposition finally mean, to be certain that, given the present position of our planet’s poles, it liespredominantly west of Syracuse. From such simple beginnings we should be able to go on to separatethe relativities that should give us pause, from ones that are irrelevant—or (at worst) are thrown likesand in the face of desert pilgrims.

2. A True InfiniteI have spent the time I did on certitude because there is not a great deal of point in asking how wemight understand things differently if we have little confidence in understanding generally. On what arevalidated understanding might encompass, I shall be brief. There is space to do little more thanpoint out several possibilities the future might explore.

An over-the-shoulder glance at the road we have come gives the lay of the land. That the regionof reality the MWM has mapped with virtual certainty—its physical domain—has proved to beincomparably more interesting than we had suspected gives us reason to think that comparableextravagance awaits our astonished discovery in its other regions as well. And as I see no better starto steer by—better either in what it promises or in reasons for adopting it—I proceed to sketch thecontours of the most interesting world I can image.44

Eaton’s soap bubbles floating in a stupendous landscape are again our guide. The entire universethe MWM knows—eight billion galaxies with over eight billion stars in each—is contained in one ofthose bubbles, so we pass now to the landscape that envelops them. It would be a mistake toapproach that landscape quantitatively, as if its size were what mattered. Size is not irrelevant—vastness has a majesty of its own—but it is the qualitative features of the surround that the imagedwells on: its hills and valleys, its forests and rivers, its sunlight and breezes, as these would showthemselves, not to a civil engineer or surveyer, but to an artist, a naturalist, or an awe-struckmountaineer.

The MWM has awesome instruments to register the quantitative marvels of reality, but itsqualitative spectrum it cannot track—not beyond the cutoff point of human experience. So itacknowledges no field or center of awareness—no intelligence, “heart,” sensibility, whatever termone prefers—that exceeds ours in the way human consciousness exceeds that of minnows or zebras.Eaton’s image challenges this myopia; those who are confined by this anthropocentrism, “thisbubble’s skin,” are persons “whose sight is weak or untrained.” Gazing on the landscape as a whole,an observer would doubtless delight in our bubble were he to notice it, but “it is a very small thing,”besides which most of its beauty derives from the way it “reflects what is outside” and enhances themajesty of the latter by its contrasting smallness.

The environment in question, we are told, is “in truth unbounded,” which is to say infinite. Theword is important in the MWM, but only in the sense in which it is used in physics and mathematics.And as these disciplines are interested only in the way the concept applies to sets and numbers, it isnot a true infinite they are occupied with. From a metaphysical standpoint, a mathematical infinite isblatantly finite, for it disregards everything in the world save several of its most abstract features.Solzhenitsyn is right: “The concept of a supreme complete entity,” one whose presence would“restrain our passions and irresponsibility,” does not figure in the postmodern outlook.45

3. Downward CausationIn the image we are working with, everything in the bubble of our universe is the consequence ofthings superior to it. The bubble comes into being because a child wants it to, and its properties—thecolors that glisten on its irridescent surface—are occasioned by the brighter colors in the worldaround it. Causation throughout is downward—from superior to inferior, from what is more to what isless.

The West has, of course, known a philosophy of this sort; Aristotle was the first to state itexplicitly. “If anyone wishes to think philosophically, Aristotle is the teacher to begin with,” a book athand advises,46 and it is especially appropriate to invoke him here because he was not overlyotherworldly; it was nature that engrossed him, even as it does us. Yet attraction seemed to him abetter model for causation than propulsion; things are lured more than they are driven.

Note to begin with how pleasing this sense of causation is, this notion that things move by beingdrawn toward what exceeds them, and will fulfill them to the degree that they refashion themselves toits likeness. For Aristotle, the entire universe was thus animated. Everything reaches toward its betterin the effort to acquire for itself its virtues, as tennis players seek out opponents who play better thanthey do, children are drawn to slightly older playmates, and dogs prefer human company to their ownkind—everywhere the compelling lure of that which we instinctively admire because of its manifestsuperiority. Aristotle’s universe is like a pyramid of magnets. Those on each tier are attracted to thetier above while being empowered by that tier to attract the magnets below them. At the apex standsthe only completely actual reality there is, the divine Prime and Unmoved Mover.

Grounded (or stuck, as one is sometimes tempted to say) in the MWM, we cannot today endorsethis vision as true, but if our blinders have not grown grotesque we can at least respect its grandeur.In the terms of our image, the thought of bubbles blown for a child’s delight has far more charm thanthe explanation (accurate, of course, but sufficient?) that credits them to the viscous properties ofmolecules. Extended to the cosmos, the child’s delight translates into lila, the Indian notion of allcreation as God’s play, but here the human domain is enough. It may not be diversionary simply to

pause for a moment to experience how good the notion of “downward causation” (as I am calling thisprinciple of persuasion from above) might feel. To have a model that inspires, that shows us what wewould like to become, while at the same time infusing us with the strength needed to approximate it,is as important a condition as life affords.

It is also one that, ontologically speaking, the MWM precludes. There is no way that mindset canallow the possibility that the universe might be ordered teleologically in the fashion just described.For to announce again the leitmotif of this essay, the MWM is a conceptual balloon inflated byknowledge of the sort that facilitates control, and such knowledge is necessarily limited (as we haveseen) to things that are inferior to us. Jacques Monod is so pertinent here that I shall quote him again,as I did in Chapters Four and Six: “The cornerstone of the scientific method is the systematic denialof final causes.”47 It should not escape us that such causes are not denied because they have beenfound not to exist; only because they have not been found to exist. But how could they have been sofound when search for them is excluded on principle—“systematic denial” is Monod’s term; even theemphasis is his. The unspoken, but in no wise obscure, reason for rejecting final causes out of hand isthat every glance in their direction would divert us from the efficient causes the MWM is bent ongetting its hand on.

It is all very clear, and also ironical. For if the only way we are permitted to account forontological novelty—new things coming into being—is through antecedent inferiors, what is thelogical terminus of this downspout that evolution converts into an upspout? We do not have to guess atthe answer, for the leading philosopher of science in the twentieth century, Karl Popper, made it thecornerstone of his life’s work. “Something,” he contended, “comes from nothing.”48

Quite apart from whether this notion has a shred of explanatory power, is it intuitivelybelievable?

4. The Self/World DivideIn the mid-1970s, a graduate student in psychology at New York University ran an experimentinvolving college undergraduates who were taking a six-week summer course in business law.Dividing them into two groups, he had both groups gaze at what looked like a blank screen for aminute or so before each class session. Four times in the course of that minute, a momentary,tachistoscopic message appeared on the screen, but as its four microseconds duration was too brieffor it to be recognized, all that the students consciously saw was a flicker of light. The messages thatwere flashed to the two groups differed; for the control group it was “People Are Walking,” whereasthe experimental group was treated to “Mommie and I Are One.” The groups had been matched forgrade point average, but when the scores of the blindly graded final examination were tabulated, the“Mommie and I” group was found to have scored almost a full letter grade higher in the course thandid the control group, the numerical averages being 90.4 percent and 82.7 percent, respectively.49

Such is the increase in power and effectiveness that can accrue when one feels tuned to one’sworld, for the tachistoscopic message is presumed to activate an early and powerful level ofconsciousness where “Mommie” represented (and in that layer of consciousness still represents) theworld at large. Some psychologists dispute this interpretation, insisting that the only way informationcan enter the nervous system is through the conscious mind, but if they are right, from whence comethe improved performances? As of this writing eight studies along the lines of the one described havebeen conducted, and whether the subjects were trying to lose weight, stop smoking, get good grades,

or improve their mental health, the results have been positive.50 A book that summarizes the entirefield of research speaks so directly to this section of my paper that its title, The Search forOneness,51’ could have served for my heading.

It hardly seems necessary to say more on this point. So much is self-evident that I feel I needonly arrange the pieces:

a. No other culture in history has tried to live by an outlook that isolates the human species fromits matrix to the degree that ours does. Whereas formerly men and women sensed themselves to bedistinguished from the rest of reality by no more than a bubble’s skin, a film so thin as to betransparent (to call again on Eaton’s image), we now face the impermeable wall of Descartes’sdisjunction. Once he categorically isolated matter from mind, science was able to seize matter(Descartes’s res extensa) like a fumbled football and run with it. The tracks it has left inscribe acosmos which, as earlier essays noted, is

denuded of all humanly recognizable qualities; beauty and ugliness, love and hate, passion and fulfillment, salvation anddamnation…Such matters [have of course] remained existential realities of human life, [but] the scientific worldview makes itillegitimate to speak of them as being “objectively” part of the world, forcing us instead to define such emotional experiencesas “merely subjective” projections of people’s inner lives.…All that which is basic to the specifically human [is] forced backupon the precincts of the “subjective” which, in turn, is pushed by the modern scientific view ever more into the province ofdreams and illusions.52

b. The consequence of this fateful divorce, so obvious that its author, Professor Stanley, referredto it as now “a Sunday-supplement commonplace,” is, as he said,

a spiritual malaise that has come to be called alienation. The world, once an “enchanted garden,” to use Max Weber’smemorable phrase, has now become disenchanted, deprived of purpose and direction, bereft—in these senses—of lifeitself.53

This is how Ernest Gellner registers the consequence:

The dehumanizing price [of this outlook] is that our identities, freedom, norms, are no longer underwritten by our vision andcomprehension of things. On the contrary we are doomed to suffer from a tension between cognition [what we believe to betrue] and identity [who we sense ourselves to be].54

c. We have been drawn into this alienating outlook, not because it is true, but by historicalchoice or accident; specifically, this essay has argued, by the way Western civilization has respondedto its invention of modern science.

It was Kant’s merit to see that this compulsion [to see things this way] is in us, not in things. It was Weber’s to see that it ishistorically a specific kind of mind, not mind as such, which is subject to this compulsion.55

Here, more than on any other point considered in this chapter, we may be beginning to see lightat the end of the tunnel, for our ecological crisis is all but forcing us to reexamine the Cartesianpremise we have built on for four hundred years. I bypass here the radical proposal (ventured byNew Age scientists like Fritjof Capra) that Mahayana Buddhism, which includes an important idealistcomponent, provides the best philosophical model for quantum physics that is currently available. I

bypass this in favor of more modest suggestions that emanate from scientists who are moremainstream. Gregory Bateson subtitled Mind and Nature, his last book, “A Necessary Unity”; andbiologist Alex Comfort argues in his I and That that though the self-world (I/That) divide is to someextent inevitable, it can hypertrophy, and in our minds has done so. Finally, there is this suggestivestatement by Lewis Thomas:

It may turn out that consciousness is a much more generalized mechanism, shared round not only among ourselves but withall the other conjoined things of the biosphere. Thus, since we are not, perhaps, so absolutely central, we may be able to get alook at it, but we will need a new technology for this kind of neurobiology; in which case we will find that we have a wholeeternity of astonishment stretching out ahead of us. Always assuming, of course, that we’re still here.56

5. We Have What We NeedOnce, when it had become clear that the days of Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco ZenCenter, were numbered, his dharma heir, Richard Baker, asked him in distress, “How will we managewithout you?” The Roshi answered, “Never forget: everything you need you already have.” There isan echo of this in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Describing his prison conversion to Islam andthe difficulty he had in getting knees to bend in prayer that until then had bent only to jimmy locks,Malcolm remarks: “I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human beingto do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.”57

It is difficult to think of a presumption more foreign to the MWM than this one. In Eaton’s imagenothing turns on time, for the limitless landscape is there from the start, waiting to be seen by anyonewho looks outside his bubble and adjusts his vision to the reaches that extend beyond it. In the MWM,however, the case is the opposite. There time is decisive. Buckminster Fuller refers to “our failedyesterday and our half-successful today.” All eyes are on tomorrow.

Partisans of the MWM are quick to object that if the Roshi’s claim were taken seriously it wouldcut the nerve of social concern. The objection leaves the Roshi’s own energetic life an anomaly, butlet that pass. I once asked Reinhold Niebuhr if relinquishing the dream of historical progress wouldcut the nerve of social action. He countered with a question of his own: “To take his work seriously,need a doctor believe that he is eradicating disease?” We are back at the point that was made insection two. All myths are tied to the Golden Age of their origin, and in the case of the MWM it wasan age when technology seemed to be effecting historical progress. So the MWM continues thismystique, focusing on society rather than the individual (specifically, on what society might give theindividual), and on the future rather than the present (on what society might provide individuals withtomorrow that it cannot provide today).

This is why in the context of the MWM the heading of this section sounds bizarre. If we think ofwhat we need as a happiness that is handed to us by society, then to say that “we have what we need”is cruelly false, for our society obviously hands us no such thing. But that society can hand peoplehappiness is an illusion that was earlier exposed. Whether it can provide individuals on average withmore opportunity than it now does to work out their own salvation, I leave as an open question.

6. ConclusionDo I expect our outlook to change in the directions I have tried to imagine? Not soon, and never foreveryone.

The first half of that answer needs no elaboration. It is obvious that the MWM is not about tocollapse in the way an avalanche of snow periodically slides off a roof. Section one of this essay wasgiven to showing how firmly entrenched it still is.

The second half of my answer, though, may seem enigmatic, so let me conclude by making it lessso. To revert for a last time to Gai Eaton’s image, let us recall that those who live within its child-blown bubble can be aware of its surrounding landscape in different ways. Some merely surmise itsexistence. Others recognize its reflections on their bubble’s surface, while still others, having a talentfor the long look, bypass the bubble’s membrane (which to others is opaque) and see what is to beseen. Though it ranks people by their respective powers of sight, this is not an egalitarian metaphor,for everyone can work to improve his metaphysical and moral vision.

If the wisdom of the ages is indeed wisdom and teaches us anything, it is that the outlook I havebeen reaching for is, details aside, the most advanced to which mind can aspire; it represents, wemight say, the higher mathematics of the human spirit. Civilizations and cultures can encourage theirpeoples to advance in its direction, but to dream of an age wherein everyone would enter it lockstepwould be to perpetuate one of the errors of the MWM itself, its excessive investment in historicalprogress.

Because I do not hope to turn againBecause I do not hopeBecause I do not hope to turn.58

If it is too much to hope that our Western outlook will turn concertedly in the directions I havenoted, it is not too much to hope that it will encourage, more than it has in the past several centuries,those who may choose to do so.

11

Beyond Postmodernism

Historical epochs do not disappear overnight, and lingering Modern assumptions continue to jostlePostmodern ones in almost even array. For this reason, though this book points beyond the latest,Postmodern wave in Western thought, it has had to contend throughout with the Modern as much aswith the Postmodern Mind. This and the preceding essay, though, address them separately.

The Modern Mind was flat because it took its directives from science, which cannot get its hands onthe component of experience that verticality tokens; namely, values.1 By contrast, the PostmodernMind (as the preface to this book indicated) is blurred and amorphous. Not only does it lack anembracing outlook; it doubts that it is any longer possible (or even desirable) to have one. It therebysignals the new chapter in intellectual history that this book pointed to in its opening essay.

It would be difficult to overestimate the size and importance of this conceptual shift. Whereas inthe past people argued and battled over which view of reality was true, the Postmodern position isthat none are true. Postmodernists even wonder if truth has any meaning in this context. As theirperspective has gained ground, the former battles between beliefs—this one against that one: scienceagainst religion, capitalism against communism—have turned into battles over the status of beliefitself.2 At stake is the question of the mind’s match with reality. Because the earlier view assumed thata match existed (an imperfect match, perhaps, but a match all the same), its view of the mind can beconsidered “perceptivist”—an awkward word, but one that points up the difference between it andthe Postmodern view of the mind, which is “constructivist.” Postmodernism considers the assumptionthat we perceive reality to be naive. We construct reality, or rather realities, for our constructs aremultiple. Realities are artifacts, and they abound.

The agent that effected this change was cultural pluralism. When people lived in isolated tribes,or even while their own civilization was virtually the only one they knew, they were not aware ofhaving views of reality; there was, for them, simply the way the world was. It took confrontationsbetween cultures to bring home the fact that people see the world in different ways. Once thatrealization was in place, the distinction between world and worldview could not be denied. Betweenthe human mind and the way the world actually is lies the mind’s view of the way it is.

In contending that minds construct their realities, it is not individual minds that Postmodernistspoint to. It is minds working together—in a word, societies—that are the agents. The title of aninfluential book, The Social Construction of Reality,3 catches the point precisely, but the view itselfis essentially the one that essays in this book (chapters 2, 6, and 7) have noted under the name of

“holism.” Theoretical holism argues for the organic character of thought: concepts cannot beunderstood in isolation; their meaning derives from the theoretical systems in which they areembedded.4 Practical holism goes on from there to argue that, because thinking invariably proceeds insocial contexts and against a backdrop of social practices, meaning derives from—roots down intoand draws its life from—those backgrounds and contexts. In considering an idea, not only must wetake into account the conceptual gestalt of which it is a part; we must also consider the “forms of life”(Wittgenstein) whose “micro-practices” (Foucault) give those gestalts their final meaning.

And that is where things end, as far as Postmodernism is concerned. If we want to know whererealities come from, the answer is: from societies, seen as cultural-linguistic wholes.

There are merits in seeing things this way, the obvious one being the tolerance which, on thesurface at least, it seems to augur. If there is no reality in the singular but only realities, eachsponsored by its respective society, these multiple realities would seem to be on an equal footing andtherefore deserving of equal respect. Beneath this genial view, though, lurk problems which can begathered under an inclusive head: the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of multiplicity.

I. The Limits of Constructivism

Multiple views, yes; multiple realities, no. Constructivists who speak of “many realities” or “manyworlds” speak either figuratively or misleadingly.5 Perspectives on the world differ, and it is goodthat we have grown wise to that fact; if snapshots of a room were taken from the view of each of thepersons who occupy it, no two would be identical. But they would be photographs of the same room.The same would hold for floor plans if the occupants were given yardsticks and asked to draw them,and it accounts as well for why pedestrians rarely collide with one another. Even if reality were nomore than the sum of all of the multiple realities the constructivist speaks of, that sum would stand asthe inclusive reality which would not itself be multiple. William James did everything he could tobreak up the idealists,“ block universe,” but he could not get away from the idea of universe itself, asthe title of his book, A Pluralistic Universe, attests.

These considerations should guard us against thinking of cultural-linguistic wholes as self-contained, totally dissimilar compartments that are hermetically sealed from one another. (This holdswhether we are thinking of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, the anthropologists’cultural relativity, Wittgenstein’s forms-of-life, Nietzsche and Heidegger’s historical horizons, orepistemic Ways of Worldmaking a la Nelson Goodman; but I shall not consider these casesindividually.) No society is totally different from other societies, so instead of thus they shouldbe visualized thus . Likewise, no society is completely isolated from its transhuman setting, so itshould be visualized thus rather than thus . As the Postmodern, constructivist pendulum hasswung too far in the direction of both of these misleading images, a few words should be said abouteach.

In support of cross-cultural overlap I shall be personal and brief. I once found myself in a stalledcar on the Serengeti Plain where roads had long since petered out. In time, two shadowy figuresappeared on the horizon. Initially, they retreated with every step I took in their direction, buteventually they allowed me to catch up with them. Nearly naked, spear-carrying Masai warriors that

they turned out to be, human beings more different from myself could hardly have been imagined.Even so, after a bit of wary give-and-take, they let me drag them physically by their wrists to my car,and an hour later (additional helpers having been commandeered) I found myself “driving” in stateacross scrubby wastelands as a dozen good samaritans (Masai warriors all), laughing and chattingthroughout, pushed my car six miles to where the team of Louis and Mary Leakey was excavatingOlduvai Gorge.

This was [a] substantial communication (sufficient to extricate me from a predicament that couldhave proven serious), [b] across a sizable cultural gap, [c] in short order (a single afternoon). Sincethat afternoon I have not been able to take seriously the thought that societies have nothing in common.(Someone has said that we are all card-carrying members of the human race. Each card carries anindividual signature, but otherwise the cards are alike.) But if there is overlap, these beachheads ofcommonality can be expanded. I shall come directly to the question of whether we want to expandthem, but before that there is the second, transhuman divide to consider.

II. Retrieving the Cosmos

If in ways we all belong to the human race, there is the larger question of whether we likewise belongto the cosmos. The Postmodern Mind sees no reason to think that we do. Walker Percy titled one ofhis books Lost in the Cosmos, and this essay opened with the constructivists’ suspicion that the wordcosmos itself—implying as it does reality-in-the-singular—has become a misnomer; multiplerealities suggest something more like chaos. Twentieth-century philosophers have created an entiresubdiscipline—phenomenology—to persuade the academic community that they have put theembarrassing subject of metaphysics behind them. Richard Rorty sums up the matter by noting (asquoted in chapter 6) that the twentieth century is ending by returning “to something reminiscent ofHegel’s sense of humanity as an essentially historical being, one whose activities in all spheres are tobe judged not by its relation to non-human reality but by comparison and contrast with its earlierachievements.” Wittgenstein provides a good chunk of the evidence for Rorty’s assertion. DavidPears calls Wittgenstein’s conclusion that “there is no conceivable way of getting between languageand the world and finding out whether there is a general fit between them” the central thesis of hislater years.6

We know why (by Postmodern lights) the fit cannot be discovered, and why in consequence wecannot know where we stand in the world. To pick up again with chapter 6, when modern sciencereplaced revelation as the road to truth, reason struck out on its own. (By “struck out” I here meanonly that it took off, but the baseball meaning also applies and could stand as modernity’s epitaph.)Every journey has its point of departure, and Descartes chose to set off from the adamantine self. Ashe set that self off from the rest of the world, dualism was built into modern epistemology’sfoundation. It has remained in place. The entire story of Western philosophy in its modern phase couldbe told as the search for a bridge between mind and its matrix, between subject and object, thatDescartes drove apart. It would be the story of failure.

The reason for the failure—Hume’s skepticism, Kant’s inaccessible noumena, right down toWittgenstein’s cage (his word) of language—is that once you set things up as Descartes did, there canbe no solution. Garbage in, garbage out, as computer programmers say. Make disjunction your starting

point and you live with it thereafter.This leads naturally to the question of whether it might not be good to consider a starting point

that would open onto wholeness and belonging. Postmodernism is disinclined to do so, and as this isa serious block to moving beyond its way of seeing things, the question deserves a section to itself.

III. The Primacy of the Whole

Postmodernism arose as a coalition of reactions-against, two of which have been predominant. As anacademic movement, it reacted (most emphatically through Deconstructionism) against the rigiditiesof structuralism, which for the preceding decade or two had insisted in anthropology, linguistics, andliterary criticism that observed phenomena are best understood in terms of certain invariant structureswhich they exhibit and are controlled by. In this respect, “deconstruction is avowedly ‘post-structuralist’ in its refusal to accept the idea of structure as in any sense given or objectively ‘there’ ina text,” a language, or a society.7

This reaction continues, but as partner to a second, political strain. Postmodernism was all butcreated by the French, and France was occupied in both world wars. This has sensitized her to thetyrannical tendencies that are latent, not only in academic fashions such as structuralism, but inpolitical ideologies and regimes as well. As a word, Derrida’s “Deconstruction” pulls againstPostmodern “constructivism,” but the tension lodges in cultural-linguistic wholes themselves: theyunite, and at the same time divide by ostracizing—to some extent inevitably ostracizing—those whofall outside their pale. Deconstructionists are the volunteer brigade within Postmodernism that patrolsthis dark side of constructivism’s socializing agent, society; they are pledged to seeing that the rightsof pariahs—outcast ideas as well as outcast people—are redressed. It is in this light that theircrusade against universalistic and tyrannizing claims generally, their celebration of difference overidentity, and their obsession with variety, heterogeneity, plurality, and otherness in almost every guiseis to be understood. Marginalizing, for them, is the unforgivable sin, and in their efforts to atone for it,the Other is raised to an object for holy concern.

The vocation is so noble and needed that it seems not only profane but radical (in NoamChomsky’s definition of a radical idea as one that lies outside the realm of acceptable discourse) topoint out that it is not the whole story. Idealism is so exclusively directed toward power relationshipstoday that discourse has come to sound almost ungrammatical if it does not contain at least a fewpassing allusions to injustice and the plight of the oppressed. This, though, is like dismissing pureresearch as irrelevant if it does not refer continually to practical applications that might accrue.Postmodern rhetoric is heavily political. The goals it espouses are mainly the right ones, but thequestion is whether the climate of opinion it is building is conducive to their realization.8 That causeis not served by suggesting, as Deconstructionists come close to suggesting, that there is a one-to-onecorrelation between unity/ diversity, on the one hand, and injustice/justice, on the other; unityproducing oppression, multiplicity liberation. Discord and anarchy are not happy conditions; but wecan be more direct. We would not honor the otherness of the Other if we did not also recognize heridentity with us. However different she may be, she is identical with us in having idiosyncratic needsthat are as entitled as are our own. Where is the place for Piaget’s “decentration” to balancePostmodernism’s incessant (and usually appropriate) plea for differences? Decentration is the

process of gradually becoming able to take a more and more universal standpoint, giving up aparticular egocentric or sociocentric way of understanding, and acting and moving towards the“universal communications community.” Postmodern sensibilities are admirably honed tosingularities, but they are flat toward the merits of bondings, even beneficent bondings. They regularlydiscount the energy, exhilaration, and compassion—let’s not forget compassion—that can enter a lifethrough the discovery of its connectedness with the Real; typically they dismiss such discoveries asdelusions and preludes to fanaticism—perversions that can occur, but are not inevitable. Nowhereamong Postmodern writers do I find an ear for the primacy of the whole over the part, which—if wecan forgive him for using the word man generically—I shall let G. K. Chesterton register for me:

The things peculiar to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable thanextraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. Thesense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, orcivilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and morestartling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even thanhaving a Norman nose.9

IV. Reason’s Complement

If we could see Deconstruction as an eternally important office of culture, the office of ombudsmanwhose job is to prevent the oppression of minorities by majorities without opposing majorities inprinciple,10 this would distinguish it from Postmodernism’s lack of an overview, which lack couldthen be addressed. To begin to address it is the object of this fourth part of this book. Believing thatthe sense of ultimate belonging is not only a psychological resource but a metaphysical birthright thathas been obscured from view, I shall suggest where we might begin to look for it.

If our disinheritance derives (more than from any other single factor) from the dualism withwhich Descartes saddled his future, it seems appropriate to consider the possibility of removing thatdualism. Science is on our side here, for twentieth-century science has found the world to be far moreinterconnected than we had supposed, with Bell’s (validated) Theorem providing the outstandingexample. In a two-particle spin, if one particle spin is up, the other is down. If researchers separatethe two particles and give one particle a spin up, the other particle—however far it has been removed—instantly spins down at a speed faster than light. A recent discussion of this finding points up theconclusion: “In the most pervasive sense there can be no such thing as independent, real situations.”Physicist Henry Stapp has called this “the most profound discovery of science.”11 If it be objected thatthis is all on the matter side of Descartes’s dichotomy, we can add that the human mind, too, isproving to be fantastic. When a boy savant can read Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline andFall of the Roman Empire and then recite it, albeit uncomprehendingly, word for word,12 we are inthe presence of mental connections we could not have suspected. Of course we do not understand themechanisms involved, but neither do we understand the mechanism of gravity, nature’s universaluniter.13

The point of these scraps of scientific trivia is to open us to the prospect that, as nature iswondrously connected and the mind likewise versatile beyond anything common sense supposes, thatmind may possess connecting faculties that dropped from sight with Descartes’s rearrangements.

Prior to Descartes, philosophers started with unity and went on to diversity, not vice versa. Thequickest way to indicate this is to say that thinking was regarded as the activity of beings (ourselves)who were theomorphic; human nature was, au fond, the imago dei, or Buddha-nature, or Atman. AsDivinity is but another word for Reality, to say that we are born of its likeness is to affirm our affinitywith it from the start.

For amplification of this idea of primordial connectedness, I refer the reader back to chapter 3.Here, for the balance of this section, I shall focus on places in the current intellectual landscapewhere the notion might escape being rejected out of hand. I shall use the word Intellect for the facultyor endowment in us that does the connecting, capitalizing the word to indicate the distinctive way Ishall be using it.

We can ease toward the concept by noting that there is something in our mental workings thatproceeds differently from reason while supporting reason and backing it up. Reason performs logicaloperations on information that is in full view and can therefore be described or defined. Through andthrough, though, we find that our understanding is floated and furthered by operations that aremysterious because all that we seem able to know about them is that we have no idea as to how theywork. We have hunches that pay off. Or we find that we know what to do in complicated situationswithout being able to explain exactly how we know. This ability is unconscious, yet it enables us toperform enormously complicated tasks, from reading and writing to farming and composing music.Expertise is coming to be recognized as more intuitive than was supposed by cognitive psychologists;these students of learning and behavior are finding that, when faced with exceptionally subtle tasks,people who “feel” or intuit their ways through them are more creative than those who consciously tryto think their way through. This explains why computer programmers no less than psychologists havehad trouble getting the expert to articulate the rules they follow. The expert is not following rules.Workers in artificial intelligence are coming to see that “human intelligence can never be replacedwith machine intelligence because we are not ourselves ‘thinking machines.’ Each of us has, and usesevery day, a power of intuitive intelligence that enables us to understand, to speak, and to copeskillfully with our everyday environment.”14 This intelligence enables us to summarize unconsciouslyour entire past—all that we have experienced and done—and let that summary affect our futuredecisions and moves.15 Programmers cannot instruct their machines to do this because no one has theslightest idea how we ourselves do it.

The above was the computer scientist speaking, but the mysterious cognitive faculty describedseems to be ubiquitous. Michael Polanyi called in tacit knowing to emphasize its subliminal locus,and cognitive psychologists nod in its direction when they tell us that knowing, feeling, and actioncannot be separated. We “perfink,” Jerome Bruner reports; which is to say that we perceive, feel, andthink simultaneously. “To separate the three is like studying the planes of a crystal separately, losingsight of the crystal that gives them being.’’16

If psychologists now recognize something besides reason at work in our knowing,epistemologists, even Modern ones, have granted this for some time. Hume saw this most clearly, andthe realization drove him to skepticism, for, blind to the Intellect, he saw nothing to vector reasonsave the passions.17 His successors resisted that conclusion. Rallying behind Kant, they found ways toprolong their faith in reason, but the point here is that in doing so they too had to recognizeextrarational cognitive capacities. The Germans distinguished verstehen and verstand from vernunft.Romantic philosophers and poets followed Blake in proposing an active imagination that in important

respects resembles the Intellect proper, and Heidegger came to extoll “thinking” over reasoning of thecalculative sort.

Thus even Modernity, with all its efforts to do so, was unable to fit the mind’s full repertoire intoreason’s mold. Prior to Modernity, this overplus was not only countenanced but accorded pride ofplace. The Vedanta grounds manas in buddhi, while Buddhists point to prajna as knowing’s supremecapacity. Both of these serve as the Intellect’s rough counterparts, but it is the Western tradition thatidentified the faculty most precisely. Released by Socrates from the tyranny of the obvious, Platodiscovered an organ of knowledge which, because it “outshines ten thousand eyes,” he called the Eyeof the Soul. Aligning it with Aristotle’s notion of the Active Intellect as the supraindividualcomponent of the mind which knows (though in individuals only potentially) everything, the medievalschoolmen worked the concept of the intellectus into its mature form. It is the mind’s foundationalfaculty, clearly distinguishable from ratio which is its emissary.

More intuitive than discursive and lodged at a level that is largely out of sight, the Intellect issomething like the tropism of plants that orients them toward light. If we try to connect an animal inthe wilds to its environment via what textbooks say about the physiology of perception, we encounterso many inexplicable gaps that rationally we would have to conclude that the animal does notperceive its world at all. (This is the psychological counterpart of philosophy’s inability to bridgewith reason the subject/ object divide that Descartes fixed in place.) Yet all the while the animalbehaves as if it perceives the world; it proceeds toward food and shelter almost unerringly. With J. J.Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception pointing the way, animal psychologists arecoming to see that they have lost sight of this incontrovertible fact.18 Trying to account for knowledgeas inference from noetic bits does not work. We must begin the other way around, Gibson insists, withthe recognition that there is a world out there (realism), and that animals are oriented to it.

V. Belonging

Whether the time is ripe to consider the possibility of an innate faculty in the human self that extendsthrough cultural-linguistic wholes to the heart of Reality itself, fulfilling thereby our deepest wish toultimately belong, I do not know; I present it simply as the most promising prospect I see. Fourcenturies of trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together having failed, it does not seem unreasonableto ask whether, analogous to the DNA that is identical in an organism’s every cell, there might besomething in Humpty Dumpty’s parts that was not affected by his fall.

Writing this concluding paragraph on the day that I learn of the death of a great Tibetan teacher,Kalu Rimpoche, I think of something he once said. “Reason tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I ameverything. Between these poles, my life unfolds.”

So, too, do our lives unfold between the poles of the Postmodern world and its sequel that isstruggling to be born.

12

The Sacred Unconscious

More than once I have foresworn prophecy; the preceding essays point to places where breakthroughsmay occur, not necessarily will occur. There are times, though, when to act as if something hashappened helps to make it happen, and this next statement adopts this approach. Taking the human selfas its object, it describes that self “from the further shore,” as Buddhists would say.

There is need to see it in that light, for the view from this shore does not do us justice; as SaulBellow points out in the Nobel Lecture I have already quoted, “We do not think well of ourselves.”The complete edition of the works of Sigmund Freud contains over four hundred entries for neurosisand none for health, and even if we bracket pathology, what account of ourselves is given bypsychologists, sociologists, historians, journalists, and writers? “In a kind of contractual daylight,”Bellow continues,

they see [us] in the ways with which we are so desperately familiar. These images of contractual daylight, so boring to us all,originate in the contemporary worldview. We put into our books the consumer, civil servant, football fan, lover, televisionviewer. And in the contractual daylight version their life is a kind of death. There is another life, coming from an insistentsense of what we are, that denies these daylight formulations and the false life—the death in life—they make for us. For it isfalse, and we know it, and our secret and incoherent resistance to it cannot stop, for that resistance arises from persistentintuitions. Perhaps humankind cannot bear too much reality, but neither can it bear too much unreality, too much abuse oftruth.

Two psychiatrists, dissatisfied with the current model of the self, have brought together a bookthat challenges its “desperately familiar…boring.…false” self-estimate. It includes this essay as mycontribution to their venture.

In The Next Million Years, a book published around the time of I Darwin’s centennial, his grandson,Charles Galton Darwin, considered the prospects for genetic engineering. Writing as a geneticist, heconcluded that the difficulties were formidable but solvable. What was not solvable, he thought, wasthe goal of such engineering—agreement as to the kind of person we would like to produce. Nietzscheand Van Gogh were geniuses but went mad—would we want their genes in our gene pool? It’s a goodquestion. It makes us see the nerve of a book that tries to define the highest good for man.

Writing as a philosopher and historian of religions, let me venture my perception of this “humanbest” as follows: If Marx unmasked our social unconscious and Freud our personal unconscious, bothpiercing through superstructures, or rather substructures, that hide true causes and motives, thesupreme human opportunity is to strike deeper still and become aware of the “sacred unconscious”

that forms the bottom line of our selfhood.I shall not go into reasons for assuming that this final unconscious exists; I have discussed some

of them in my Forgotten Truth, where I use the word spirit for what I am here calling the sacredunconscious. Nor will I map here our human consciousness to show the relation of this deepest levelto levels that are more proximate; that I attempted in the chapter on “The Levels of Selfhood” in thebook just mentioned. Instead, I shall try to surmise what our lives would be like if our deepestunconscious were directly available to us. What would a superbly realized human being, hereconceived as one that is consciously aware of his or her sacred unconscious, be like? How wouldsuch a person look to others and feel to him/ herself?

It is easier to say what s/he would not be like than to picture him or her positively, as the “tragicflaw” theory of art reminds us. No writer would dream of trying to create a perfect hero; he wouldsense instinctively that such a figure would seem fictitious—a cardboard cutout. But let the authorendow an otherwise strong character with a tragic weakness—Hamlet’s indecision is the standardexample—and our imaginations will correct that weakness on their own; convincingly, moreover, forwe graft the missing virtue onto a character whose imperfection makes him believable. The sameprinciples apply when we try (as here) to describe human wholeness, not concretely as the artistdoes, but abstractly: we are on firmest ground when we state the case negatively. To cite an historicalinstance, the Buddha’s characterization of enlightenment as the absence of hatred, greed, andignorance draws its force from being solidly anchored in real life: its key terms refer to traits we livewith all the time. But if we try to restate his formula in positive terms and say that to be enlightened isto be filled with love, wisdom, and an impartial acceptance of everything, our description becomesabstract. Obviously, we have some acquaintance with these virtues, but acquaintance is not what is atstake. The goal is to be suffused with these virtues, to be filled by them completely. That we haveonly the faintest notion of what these positive terms mean when they are raised to their maximum,goes without saying.

Definition of a JivanmuktaSo now we have two wise caveats before us: Darwin’s, that we do not know what the summumbonum is; and Buddha’s, that we do best to approach it negatively. I propose to throw these warningsto the wind and attempt a positive depiction of a jivanmukta, as the Indians would refer to a fullyrealized person: a jiva (soul) that is mukta (liberated, enlightened) in this very life. The project mustfail, of course, but that does not keep it from being interesting. Perhaps, in keeping with the tragicflaw theory I just alluded to, its very failure may induce the reader to round out in his own imaging thepicture which words can never adequately portray.

An enlightened being, I am proposing, is one who is in touch with his deepest unconscious, anunconscious which (for reasons I shall be introducing) deserves to be considered sacred. Our centuryhas acquainted us with regions of our minds that are hidden from us and the powerful ways theycontrol our perceptions. My thesis is that underlying these proximate layers of our unconscious mindsis a final substrate that opens mysteriously onto the world as it actually is. To have access to this finalsubstrate is to be objective in the best sense of the word and to possess the virtues and benefits thatgo with this objectivity.

Normally, we are not in touch with this objective component of ourselves—which paradoxicallyis also our deepest subjective component—because intermediate layers of our unconscious screen it

from us while at the same time screening the bulk of the world from us. Our interests, drives, andconcerns, their roots largely hidden from our gaze, cause us to see what we want to see and need tosee; most of the rest of reality simply passes us by. The Tibetans make this point by saying that when apickpocket meets a saint, what he sees are his pockets. Moreover, the things we do see we seethrough lenses that are “prescription ground,” so to speak; our interests and conditionings distort theway they appear to us. When poor children are asked to draw a nickel they draw it larger than dochildren for whom nickels are commonplace; it looms larger in their minds’ eye. In many such ways,what we take to be objective facts are largely psychological constructs, as the Latin factum, “thatwhich is made,” reminds us.

This much is now psychological truism. We enter more interesting terrain when we note that at adeeper level the thoughts and feelings that control what we see are themselves shaped by what theBuddha called the three poisons: desire (lust, greed, grasping), aversion (fear, hatred, anger), andignorance.1 And the greatest of these is ignorance. For it is ignorance—most pointedly ignoranceconcerning our true identity, who we really are—that causes us to divide the world into what we likeand dislike. Thinking that we are separate selves,2 we seek what augments these selves and shun whatthreatens them. What we call our “self” is the amalgam of desires and aversions that we havewrapped tightly, like the elastic of a golf ball, around the core of separate identity that is its center.

This tight, constricted, golf-ball self is inevitably in for hard knocks, but what concerns us hereis that on average it does not feel very good. Anxiety hovers ‘round its edges. It can feel victimizedand grow embittered. It is easily disappointed and can become unstrung. To others, it often seems noprettier than it feels to itself: petty, self-centered, drab, and bored.

I am deliberately putting down this golf-ball self—hurling it to the ground, as it were, to see howhigh our total self can bounce; how far toward heaven it can rise. To rise, it must break out of the hardrubber strings that are normally stretched so tightly around it, encasing it in what Alan Watts called“the skin-encapsulated ego.” If we change our image from rubber to glass and picture the threepoisons as a lens that refracts light waves in keeping with our private, importunate demands, thenrelease from such egocentric distortions will come through progressively decreasing our lenses’curve—reducing its bulge. The logical terminus of this reduction would be plate glass. Through thiswe would be able to see things objectively, as they are in themselves in their own right.

This clear plate glass, which for purposes of vision is equivalent to no glass at all, is our sacredunconscious. It is helpful to think of it as an absence because, like window glass, it functions bestwhen it calls no attention to itself. But it is precisely its absence that makes the world available to us:“The less there is of self, the more there is of Self,” as Eckhart put the matter. From clear glass wehave moved to no glass—the removal of everything that might separate subject from object, self fromworld. Zennists use the image of a Great Round Mirror. When the three poisons are removed from it,it reflects the world just as it is.

To claim that human consciousness can move permanently into this condition goes too far, butadvances along the asymptotic curve that slopes in its direction are clearly perceptible. When ouraversion lens is powerful, bulging toward the limits of a semicircle, we like very little that comes ourway. The same holds, of course, for our desire lens, which is only the convex side of our aversion’sconcave: the more these bend our evaluations toward our own self-interests, the less we are able toappreciate things in their own right. Blake’s formulation of the alternative to this self-centeredoutlook has become classic. “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to

man as it is, infinite.”The fully realized human being is one whose doors of perception have been cleansed. And these

doors, which up to this point I have referred to as windows, I am here envisioning as successivelayers of our unconscious minds. Those that are near the surface vary from person to person, for theyare deposited by our idiosyncratic childhood experiences. At some level, though, we encounter thethree poisons (once again, greed, aversion, and ignorance) that are common to mankind and perhapsin some degree essential for our human functioning. But the deepest layer, we have seen, is really ano-layer, for being a glass door ajar, or a mirror that discloses things other than itself, it isn’t there.Even if it were there, in what sense could we call it ours? For when we look toward it we see simply—world.

This opening out onto the world’s infinity is one good reason for calling this deepest stratum ofthe human unconscious sacred, for surely holiness has something to do with the whole. But theconcreteness of Blake’s formulation is instructive. He doesn’t tell us that a cleansed perceptiondiscloses the Infinite per se. It finds it in the things at hand, in keeping with those Buddhist stories thattell us that the most sacred scriptures are its unwritten pages—an old pine tree gnarled by wind andweather, or a skein of geese flying across the autumn sky.

Description of a JivanmuktaThus far I have defined a jivanmukta; it remains to describe him or her. What does life feel like tosuch a person, and how does s/he appear to others?

Basically, s/he lives in the unvarying presence of the numinous. This does not mean that s/he isexcited or “hyped”; his/ her condition has nothing to do with adrenalin flow, or with manic states thatcall for depressive ones to balance the emotional account. It is more like what Kipling had in mindwhen he said of one of his characters, “He believed that all things were one big miracle, and when aman knows that much he knows something to go upon.” The opposite of the sense of the sacred is notsadness, which has its place in life—Jesus wept. It is drabness; taken-for-grantedness. Lack ofinterest. The humdrum and prosaic.

All other attributes of a jivanmukta must be relativized against this one absolute: his/her honedsense of the astounding mystery of everything. All else we say of him must have a yes/no quality. Iss/he always happy? Well, yes and no. On one level s/he emphatically is not; if s/he were s/he couldn’t“weep with those who mourn”—s/he would be an unfeeling monster, a callous brute. If anything, arealized soul is more in touch with the grief and sorrow that is part and parcel of the human condition,knowing that it, too, needs to be accepted and lived as all life needs to be lived. To reject the shadowside of life, to pass it by with averted eyes refusing our share of common sorrow while expecting ourshare of common joy, would cause the unlived, rejected shadows to deepen in us as fear of death. Astory that is told of the recent Zen Master Shaku Soen points up the dialectical stance of the realizedsoul toward the happiness we are noting. When he was able to do so, he liked to take an eveningstroll through a nearby village. One evening he heard wailing in a house he was passing and, onentering quietly, found that the householder had died and his family and neighbors were crying.Immediately he sat down and began crying, too. An elderly gentleman, shaken by this display ofemotion in a famous master, remarked, “I would have thought that you, at least, were beyond suchthings.” “But it is this which puts me beyond it,” the Master replied through his sobs.3

The Master’s tears we can understand; the sense in which he was “beyond” them is as difficultto fathom as the peace that passeth understanding. The peace that comes when a man is hungry andfinds food, is sick and recovers, or is lonely and finds a friend—peace of this sort is readilyintelligible. But the peace that passeth understanding comes when the pain of life is not relieved. Itshimmers on the crest of a wave of pain; it is the spear of frustration transformed into a shaft of light.The Master’s sobs were real, yet paradoxically they did not erode the yes-experience of the East’s “itis as it should be” and the West’s “Thy will be done.”

In our efforts to conceive the human best, everything turns on an affirmation that steers betweencynicism on the one hand and sentimentality on the other. A realized self is not incessantly, andthereby oppressively, cheerful—oppressively, not only because we suspect some pretense in hisunvarying smile, but because it underscores our moodiness by contrast. Not every room a jivanmuktaenters floods with sunlight; he can flash indignation and upset money changers’ tables. Not invariancebut appropriateness is his hallmark, an appropriateness that has the whole repertoire of emotions atits command. The Catholic Church is right in linking radiance with sanctity, but the paradoxical, “inspite of” character of this radiance must again be stressed. Along with being a gift to be received, lifeis a task to be performed. The adept performs it. Whatever his hand finds to do, he does with all hismight. Even if it proves his lot to walk stretches of life as a desert waste, he walks them rather thanpining for alternatives. Happiness enters as by-product. What matters focally, as the Zen MasterDogen never tired of noting, is resolve.

If a jivanmukta isn’t forever radiating sweetness and light, neither does he constantly emit blastsof energy. He can be forceful when need be; we find it restoring rather than draining to be in hispresence, and he has reserves to draw on, as when Socrates stood all night in trance and outpaced themilitia with bare feet on ice. In general, though, we sense him/her as relaxed and composed ratherthan charged—the model of the dynamic and magnetic personality tends to contain a lot of ego thatdemands attention. Remember, everything save the adept’s access to inner vistas, the realms of gold Iam calling the sacred unconscious, must be relativized. If leadership is called for, the adept stepsforward; otherwise, he is just as happy to follow. He is qualified to be a guru, but does not need to beone—he does not need disciples to fortify his self-esteem. Focus or periphery, limelight or shadow, itdoes not really matter. Both have their opportunities, both their limitations.

All these relativities I have mentioned—happiness, energy, prominence, impact—pertain to thejivanmukta’s finite self which he progressively relaxes as he makes his way toward his final, sacredunconscious. As his goal is an impersonal, impartial one, his identification with it involves a dying tohis finite selfhood. This finite self is engaged in a vanishing act, as Coomaraswamy suggested whenhe wrote, “Blessed is the man on whose tomb can be written, Hic jacet nemo—here lies no one.”

But having insisted above that there is only one absolute or constant in the journey toward thisself-naughting; namely, the sense of the sacred, that luminous mystery in which all things are bathed, Imust now admit that there is another: the realization of how far we all are from the goal that beckons,how many peaks and deserts have yet to be crossed—“Why callest thou me good?” As human beingswe are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves. Only theslightest of barriers separates us from our sacred unconscious; it is infinitely close to us. But we areinfinitely far from it, so for us the barrier looms as a mountain that we must remove with our ownhands. We scrape away at the earth, but in vain; the mountain remains. Still we go on digging at themountain, in the name of God or whatever. For the most part we only hear of the final truth; very

rarely do we actually see it. The mountain isn’t there. It never was there.

13

The Incredible Assumption

This final selection involves a change of pace. Its different style derives from its having beendelivered as a sermon in Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago in 1960. It is thus theearliest of the writings here assembled; but as its thesis pervades them all, it draws them together androunds them off as a finale.

One hears on all sides that the conflict between science and religion is over. For four centuries thebattle has raged: in astronomy over the earth’s position in the universe; in geology over the earth’sage; in biology over the evolutionary hypothesis; in psychology over Freud’s right to “peep andbotanize into man’s soul.” Bitter the struggle has been, and long. Yet (so runs the tale) it has achievedits purpose. Resolution has been secured, concord established. Councils of bishops now speak ofscientists as having a religious obligation to follow the truth wherever it leads, and scientists,rejecting the Comptean thesis that religion is to be superseded by science, are busy setting upinstitutes for religion in an age of science. Occasionally a Bible-belt college shows bad form byrefusing to allow evolution to be taught, or a Jesuit priest writes an eyebrow-raising book on thephenomenon of man. But these are exceptions. Concord and good fellowship are the orders of the day.For is not truth one, and are not science and religion but two complementary approaches to it?

In the midst of so much agreement, a demur may sound jarring, but I think it has its place. Severalyears devoted to teaching religion at one of the leading scientific institutions of our day has led me tosee the matter in a somewhat different light.

It’s true, of course, that the former battles are drawing to a close. Copernicus, Darwin, Freud—geology and Genesis are not today the war cries they used to be.1 But the fact that certain battles haverun their course is no guarantee that a general armistice has been signed, let alone that a just anddurable peace has been established. I, for one, suspect that we are still a long way from the day whenlion and lamb shall lie down together, and sages sit, each under his own disciplinary vine and fig tree,in full accord.

As I shall be saying some things about science in the minutes ahead, it is important that I interjecta disclaimer. The fact that I happen to be in the employ of an institution polarized around scienceshould be taken to mean no more than just that. A British statesman once confessed that his knowledgeof mathematics stopped with a desperate finality just where the difficulties began. I could easilyparaphrase that statement in present context; a college major in any of the sciences could step to theboard and produce equations that would bring my thinking to instant halt. Still, it is impossible to

teach at a place like M.I.T. without encountering certain winds of doctrine, and over the years avision of the program on which science is embarked has come to take shape in my mind.

It has six parts:First, we shall create life. Some assume that in a rudimentary way—with the giant molecules,

amino acids, and viruses—this breakthrough has been achieved already.Second, we shall create minds. At this point some of us are likely to suspect a gigantic finesse,2

but no matter: with cybernetics and artificial intelligence, the analogy between minds and thinkingmachines is being pressed to the hilt.

Third, we shall create adjusted individuals via chemistry: tranquilizers and energizers,barbiturates and amphetamines, a complete pharmacopeia to control our moods and feelings.

Fourth, we shall create the good society via “behavioral engineering,” a program ofconditioning, liminal and subliminal, which through propaganda and hidden persuaders will inducemen to behave in ways conducive to the common good.

Fifth, we shall create religious experiences by way of the psychedelics: LSD, mescalin,psilocybin, and their kin.

Sixth, we shall conquer death; achieve physical immortality by a combination of organtransplants and geriatrics that first arrest the aging process and then roll it back in rejuvenation. (SeeRobert Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality.)

I hasten to insert two qualifications. I have not heard any scientist list these six objectives asparts of a single program, and there are many who discount all of them. But the basic point stands.Each of the six parts of this emerging program commands not just the labors but the faith of some ofour finest scientists. Several years ago I invited B. F. Skinner, dean of American experimentalpsychologists, to discuss with my students the behaviorally engineered utopia he had sketched inWalden Two. In introducing him I said that I wanted the students to have major purchase on his time,but I wanted to ask one question and I would ask it at the start. A decade had passed since he wrotethat book; had his thinking changed significantly in the interval? Frankly, I expected him to enter somequalifications, to confess that he had been a somewhat younger man then and that things were provingto be a bit more complicated than he had supposed. To my surprise his answer was the opposite. “Mythoughts certainly have changed/’ he said, “This thing is coming faster than I had suspected would bepossible.”

Perhaps my theology has been inadequately demythologized, but I have difficulty squaring thissixfold program with religion. To the extent that it is taken seriously, God would seem indeed to bedead; to the extent that it is actualized, he will be buried. (See E.O. Wilson’s God’s Funeral.) Insteadof a thing of the past, the conflict between science and religion may be shaping up in proportionsgreater than any we have thus far known.

I have no wish, however, to pursue this prospect further. Instead, I should like to reverse the driftI have followed up to this point. Having refused to cry peace where there is no peace, let me now askwhether science, whatever the conscious stance of its practitioners, does not in fact provide us withsome clues as to what religion is essentially about.

What is the upshot of man’s venture into reality by way of science? Brush aside the details ofspecific discoveries that are being reported at the rate of two million a year and come at once to thepoint. From the theoretical standpoint, the basic upshot of science is that it has disclosed a universe

which in its factual nature is infinitely beyond anything we could have imagined while relying on ourunaided senses.

A routine recall of two or three well-known facts will make this abundantly evident. Lighttravels at the rate of 186,000 miles per second. That’s about seven times around the world eachsecond. Now take the time-span that separates us from Christ and multiply it, not fifty times, but fiftythousand times, and you have the approximate time it takes a beam of light to move from one end ofour galaxy to the other.

Our sun rotates around the center of our galaxy at a speed of one hundred sixty miles per second.That’s fast; how fast we can perhaps appreciate if we recall the difficulty we have had getting rocketsto attain a speed of seven miles per second, the speed required for them to escape from our earth’satmosphere. The sun travels roughly twenty-two times as fast as this escape rate, at which speed ittakes it approximately 224 million years to complete one revolution around our galaxy. If thesefigures sound astronomical, they are actually parochial, for they are confined to our own galaxy.Andromeda, our second closest neighbor, is one-and-a-half million light-years removed, beyondwhich the universe falls away abysmally, range after range, world after world, island universe afterisland universe. In other directions the figures are equally incomprehensible. Avogadro’s number tellsus that the number of molecules in four-and-a-half drams of water (roughly half an ounce) is 6.023times 1023, roughly 100,000 billion billion. It’s enough to make one dizzy; enough to make the mindreel, and spin, and cry out for a stop. Nay, more. From the vantage of our ordinary senses the vision isincredible—utterly, absolutely, completely incredible.

Only, of course, it’s true.Now along comes an Isaiah, a Christ, a Paul, a Saint Francis, a Buddha; along come men who

are religiously the counterparts of Copernicus, Newton, Faraday, Kepler, and they tell us somethingequally incredible about the universe in its value dimension. They tell us of depth upon depth of valuefalling away from this visible world and our ordinary perceptions. They tell us that this universe inall its vastness is permeated to its very core by love. And that’s incredible. I look at the newspaperevery morning and say to myself, “It cannot be!” Yet in my reflective moments I find myself adding,“Is it, after all, any more incredible—does it any more exceed the limits of our normal humanexperience—than what my science colleagues are saying in their sphere?”

Of course, scientists have the advantage here, for they can prove their hypotheses, whereasvalues and meanings elude the devices of science like the sea slips through the nets of fishermen. Butthis only leads me to press the analogy between science and religion farther. The factual marvels ofthe physical universe are not evident to the naked eye. Who, relying only on his own gross, unaidedvision, could suspect that electrons are circling their nuclei at the rate of a million million times asecond? Such truths are disclosed to the scientists only through certain key perceptions, certaincrucial experiments. The far-flung embroideries of science, and the entire scientific worldview, arebased on a relatively small number of such experiments.

If this be true in science, why not in religion as well? If factual truth is disclosed not throughroutine perceptions but through key or crucial ones, might not this be the case with religious truth aswell? The Lord appearing high and lifted up to Isaiah; the heavens opening to Christ at his baptism;the universe turning into a bouquet of flowers for Buddha beneath the Bo tree. John reporting, “I wason an island called Patmos, and I was in a trance.” Saul struck blind on the Damascus road. ForAugustine, it was the voice of a child saying, “Take, read”; for Saint Francis, a voice which seemed

to come from the crucifix. It was while Saint Ignatius sat by a stream and watched the running water,and that curious old cobbler Jacob Boehme was looking at a pewter dish, that there came to each thatnews of another world which it is always religion’s business to convey.

A final step in the comparison is needed. If the universe of science is not evident to our ordinarysenses but is elaborated from certain key perceptions, it is equally the case that these perceptionsrequire their appropriate instruments: microscopes, Palomar telescopes, cloud chambers, and thelike. Again, is there any reason why the same should not hold for religion? A few words by that late,shrewd lay theologian, Aldous Huxley, make the point well. “It is a fact, confirmed and reconfirmedby two or three thousand years of religious history,’’ he wrote, “that Ultimate Reality is not clearlyand immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart, andpoor in spirit.” Perhaps such purity of heart is the indispensable instrument for disclosing the keyperceptions on which religion’s incredible assumption is grounded. With the unaided eye, a smallfaint smudge can be detected in the constellation of Orion and doubtless an imposing cosmologicaltheory founded on this smudge. But no amount of theorizing, however ingenious, could ever tell us asmuch about the galactic and extragalactic nebulae as can direct acquaintance by means of a goodtelescope, camera, and spectrascope.

I don’t know in what direction such thoughts drive your mind; mine they drive in the direction ofGod. But the word doesn’t matter; it’s the assumption itself that counts, or rather the reality to which itpoints. Just as science has found the power of the sun itself to be locked in the atom, so religion (bywhatsoever name) proclaims the glory of the eternal to be reflected in the simplest elements of time: aleaf, a door, an unturned stone. And so, for this quasi-religious, quasi-secular age, these lines titled“White Heron” by John Ciardi:

What lifts the heron leaning on the airI praise without a name. A crouch, a flare,a long stroke through the cumulus of trees,a shaped thought at the sky—then gone. O rare!Saint Francis, being happiest on his knees,would have cried Father! Cry anything you please

But praise. By any name or none. But praisethe white original burst that lightsthe heron on his two soft kissing kites.When saints praise heaven lit by doves and rays,I sit by pond scums till the air recitesIts heron back. And doubt all else. But praise.3

Epilogue:Exploring Religious Frontiers

This epilogue, which my publishers have asked me to append, is transcribed from the first KernLecture sponsored by the Theosophical Society in America and delivered at the BedermanAuditorium, Chicago, Illinois, on 18 April 2002.

It is a great honor for me to have the opportunity to inaugurate this Kern lectureship. As a student ofworld religions, I am, of course, very familiar with the lines “One to me is fame and shame; one to meis loss and gain; one to me is pleasure, pain,” from the Bhagavad Gita. To practice those lines is tobring together life’s opposites. I’ve been working on doing that for many years. But tonight I am on thelam; it’s a holiday, and my spiritual mentor is Joe Lewis, who toward the end of his life said, “I’vebeen rich and I’ve been poor; and believe me, rich is better.” So tomorrow I’ll get to work again on“One to me is fame and shame,” but tonight I’m just going to wallow in glory and celebrity and enjoyit.

I would never have thought to propose the title of these remarks, which I owe to the organizersof the lectureship. As you might imagine, publishers and agents, more and more every year, have beenleaning on me to write my autobiography, and I have flatly refused. There is nothing whatsoever thatlures me in that direction. But this lecture comes at it from a different angle, not so much the facts andevents of a life as the key points in its development, providing an opportunity to take notice of issuesthat I’ve come upon in the course of my journey. And I must say, the more I got into the suggestedtopic, the more I enjoyed reflecting back on what were the key points that directed me on my life’sjourney.

The first poem I ever memorized was Rudyard Kipling’s “The Explorer,” which had a greatimpact on me. It goes like this:

“There’s no sense in going further—it’s the edge of cultivation,”So they said, and I believed it—broke my land and sowed my crop—

Built my barns and strung my fences in the little border stationTucked away below the foothills where the trails run out and stop:

Till a voice, as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changesOn one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated—so:

“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—“Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”

I must have been about twelve years old when I memorized that poem, but even then I recognizedthat, yes, I wanted to go and look beyond the foothills where the trails run out and stop, to find what ishidden behind the Ranges. For this evening, I have itemized twelve frontiers that I crossed to explore

what lay on the other side:

1. My life began in China, with missionary parents in a small inland town where we were theonly foreigners. That wasn’t a frontier, that was just home. Growing up there, I had the language of anative speaker, and in fact my two brothers and I have been told that, after we all came to America,when we were together we would talk in Chinese rather than in English. So my small town in Chinawasn’t a frontier, it was home. My first frontier was America, when I arrived at college age and cameto the United States.

That was an amazing frontier. Never mind that my landing pad in the United States was CentralMethodist College, enrollment six hundred, in Fayette, Missouri, population three thousand. Nevermind all that. Compared with Podunk, China, it was the Big Apple, bright lights, and the big time.After all, Fayette had radios, a motion picture theater, and of course, cars. I had come over intendingto get my educational credentials and go right back to China. Because I had only one American malerole model, my father, I assumed that missionaries were what American boys grew up to be. But thatlasted about two weeks. With all the dynamism and action in Fayette, Missouri, I wasn’t going to goand waste my life stagnating in traditional rural China.

2. After I had come to America, the next frontier was that of the mind. It happened verydramatically. I’ll prefix it with a confession. (We all know that an honest confession is good for thesoul—unfortunately, it can be very bad for the reputation, but I’ll confess anyway.) When I enteredcollege at seventeen, I wanted to be Big Man on Campus, and I thought the way to do that was to joinall the organizations I could get into and make my presence known. That stayed firm for two and ahalf years, until midway in my junior year. There was in this college, which was anything butdistinguished, one splendid professor, and that’s all a college needs. He was in philosophy andreligion, my field. He started a little philosophy of religion club, and I feel sorry for the studentstoday in their mega-universities. In my little college, we were in and out of our teachers’ homes allthe time. One evening a month we would go to this professor’s house and take turns reading a five-page paper and then discuss it. At the end, cherry pie a la mode would appear, and we would go backto our dorm.

For me, one of these evenings was different from all the others. From the start, I felt atremendous agitation as I was drawn into the issues we were discussing, and that lasted on the wayhome. My fellow students and I kept talking, and when we reached the dorm a little nucleus of four orfive of us stood in the hall for another ninety minutes, going at it hammer and tongs. When I finallywent up to my room, the ideas were still charging around my mind. And that kept on until around twoo’clock in the morning, when it seemed like my mind detonated.

To try to give an impression of what I experienced, I remind those of you who have seen themovie 2001: A Space Odyssey of the scene that tried to convey the future rushing at you. Streamerscame out of the back of the screen, directly at you, and flashed by, disappearing into the past behindyou. My experience was like that. But it wasn’t like special effects, it was like Platonic ideas, andthey were so real that they were palpable. There I was, a young man with an entire life to explorethose ideas. I wonder if I slept a wink that night. But in any case, that was the turning point that led meto the vocation of a professor of philosophy and religion. My landing pad in America had become thelaunching pad for my career.

3. The next frontier was science, and it led me to the University of Chicago, where science wasvery prominent in the curriculum. What impressed me was the power of science—it has changed ourworld beyond all recognition. My friends and our servants in the Chinese town could never haveimagined the world we inhabit in the technological West. Along with its technological innovations,science has also changed our worldview. I was young, impressionable, fresh to the confusions of theworld, and I became converted to what I now call scientism, the belief that science gives us thebiggest picture—not the Bible, as I thought in my youth, not even religion—but science. And Ianswered that call with every cell of my being. That frontier stayed in place until I was within acouple of months of completing my doctoral dissertation, when all of a sudden, another frontier—avery different one—appeared on a second unforgettable night. I’ve only had two nights as dramatic asthose (leaving aside my wedding night—I just thought of that).

4. The second unforgettable night came from reading the first book on mysticism I had everencountered: Gerald Heard’s Pain, Sex and Time: A New Outlook on Evolution and the Future ofMan. It presented mysticism and the mystical worldview. From its opening page, that book took meover, and I found that from the soles of my feet all the way up, I was saying “Yes! This is the waythings are!” As for my scientific worldview, which I had been so gung-ho for, it collapsed that nightlike a house of cards. So I crossed the frontier into mysticism. Mysticism was not in high regard in themiddle of the twentieth century. I had an undergraduate degree in religion and a Ph.D. in thephilosophy of religion, and I had never been required to read any mystical text. That wouldn’t bepossible today, because now mysticism is everywhere. I’m sure that the mystics were listed in thebibliography of suggested readings in some of my course books, but whoever gets to those? Becausemysticism was not fashionable in academia then, I turned to the closest thing to it: world religions,where mysticism abounds.

5. Being then at the beginning of my teaching career, I requested to teach a course on “WorldReligions” because Heard’s book had shown me that mysticism turns up in every culture, and Iwanted to explore it. Just before moving to Washington University in Saint Louis, I paid a visit toAldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. And they said, “You’re going to St. Louis, we hear; there’s a verygood swami there.” Swami? I don’t think I even knew what the word meant. However, I was hangingonto every word of theirs, and they even gave me his name—Swami Satprakashananda of theRamakrishna Vivekananda Order. And so the first week I was in Saint Louis, I looked up his name inthe phone book and paid him a visit. It set my course for a decade. I had met learned scholars beforeand holy individuals before, but I had never found holiness and scholarship combined in oneindividual, as they were in Swami Satprakashananda. So naturally I apprenticed, and in ten years byweekly tutorials, he laid down the Vedanta in my understanding.

Eventually I moved east, where Daisetz Suzuki at Columbia University was bringing ZenBuddhism to America. I was then teaching at MIT—chronologically the frontiers I am reporting werenot sharply divided—and while Suzuki was there I went down to New York as often as I could. Zenoccupied me for a decade that culminated in a summer’s training in a monastery in Kyoto.

After that, Rumi came onto the scene with the Sufis, and so it has gone. People think that maybe Istarted out with a shopping list. Coming out of Christianity, first I’ll tick off Hinduism, and then I’llcheck out Buddhism, and then I’ll go to Sufism and Islam. It wasn’t that way at all. At every stage, I

was perfectly content with what I had. But it was as if the tidal waves of different traditions camecrashing over me, and I found each adding immeasurably to my religious understanding. There isn’ttime to prioritize in each and say, This is what practically knocked me over. But that’s the frontier intoworld religions, which has continued as the focus of my career. I wasn’t looking for these frontiers,they just appeared.

6. The next frontier was writing, and here’s how it came about. When I was at WashingtonUniversity, a new dean of Liberal Arts was appointed whose field was biology. When he becamedean, he said, “I don’t know what the liberal arts are—I’m a biologist.” So he applied to the CarnegieFoundation, and they gave him $18,000 to learn what the liberal arts are. The way he went about hisself-education was to pick out a dozen or so faculty members in liberal arts whom he considered thebrightest minds in each field. For an academic year, we met every other week in his apartment,discussing great books like The Aims of Education by Alfred North Whitehead and The Idea of aUniversity by John Henry Newman.

The sessions were enjoyable and stimulating, but when the academic year came to an end, thedean said, “I’ve learned a lot from these discussions, but the Carnegie Foundation says it wants areport of what I did with their $18,000. So Huston, you’re a bright young punk. Here’s a bushel basketof the notes that I’ve made on our sessions. You’re scheduled to teach this summer, but I’ll relieve youfrom teaching, and instead of that, you write the report.” I did, he liked it, and the Liberal Arts facultyapproved it, saying, “Yes, this is what we’re going to do.”

And there it would have rested, had I not, when crossing the campus one day, met a colleague inthe Speech Department who said, “Huston, I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you. One of mycourses this semester is choral reading, and for one of our numbers, we’re reading three paragraphsfrom that report you wrote.” The idea of a committee report being intoned as art struck me as sobizarre that when I got to my office, I reached into my file, pulled out the report, and found the threeparagraphs he had referred me to. And as I read them, I found myself saying, “Hey…not bad…verygood!” So on impulse I reached for an envelope and addressed it to what was then the publishingcompany Harper Brothers; and within a week a response came, saying “It has to be expandedtenfold/’ but a contract was enclosed. There I was, about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, andI already had a book contract. When I think how hard it is for unknown people to get a book publishedtoday, I am still amazed, but there it was. I discovered, from that and from the response that followedthe book’s publication, that I could write. And so I crossed that frontier, and to this day, if I canmanage to do so, I spend the hours before noon writing.

7. After that came the invitation to join the faculty at MIT. Washington University had come tolike me, and I liked the university, and they did everything to get me to stay. But it was the challengeof a new frontier. MIT was the most important technological institute in the world, and they wereinviting me to start a department of philosophy. What could be more interesting or challenging? Andso I went and stayed for fifteen years, the longest stint I have ever taught at one place. Those yearswere tumultuous because, during them, two worlds were trying to live together inside me—onescientific and one traditional. MIT was, scientifically, the cutting-edge of the future, and my worldwas humanistic. Those two rubbed together for fifteen years. All of my students were science majors,most of my colleagues were world-class scientists, and I was a humanist in religion. It was rough and

tumble.I remember once, when I was talking with a scientist in the faculty club, the issue came up, as it

often did—“What’s the real difference between science and the humanities?” We were gettingnowhere in resolving the question when, while I was saying something, he broke in and said, “I’vegot it: the difference is that I count and you don’t.” That was wonderful because mathematics is thelanguage of science, and in my work I don’t do much counting. His double entendre carried theconnotations of both numbers and academic standing. Those years were turbulent, but I could neverhave been anywhere else that was as stimulating in forcing me to think through the issues betweenscience and religion.

8. After fifteen years, Syracuse University called and said, ‘‘We’ve gotten an endowed chair inour graduate program, would you be interested?” I said, “You can try to interest me, but I don’t thinkyou’ll succeed.” But they did. And the reason was that all of my teaching had thus far beenundergraduate, and the appeal of teaching on the graduate level won out. I wasn’t disillusioned orbored with undergraduate teaching, but I knew what that was like, and I didn’t know what directinggraduate study was like—going deeper with a nucleus of students. So I went to Syracuse, crossing thefrontier from undergraduate to graduate teaching.

9. But more important was the fact that at Syracuse I crossed the frontier to the tribal, indigenouspeoples and their religious outlook. Soon after we moved to Syracuse and bought our house, wediscovered that it was only five miles from the Onondaga Reservation. One afternoon, we drove outto the reservation, and afterwards I repeated the drive many times. Gradually, I started spending moreand more time with many Native Americans and their chiefs. I remember driving home one Saturdayafternoon after having been on the reservation the whole day; and, as I sometimes do when I’m alonein the car and get excited, I talked out loud to myself. I can still remember finding myself saying,“Huston, for thirty-five years you have been circling this globe trying to understand the worldviews ofpeople different from yours, and here is one that has been under your feet the entire time, and youhaven’t given it the time of day.”

That realization opened my eyes, and it culminated in the revised edition of The World’sReligions, in which the final substantive chapter is on the primal religions, the religions of theindigenous peoples of the world. That ending is appropriate because the other religions treated in thebook, our historical religions, go back no more than about six thousand years. But the religions ofindigenous peoples go back to the twilight zone of history. I’m glad I will not go to my grave with abook on the world’s religions that totally overlooked them.

10. The tenth frontier is the issue of justice, which my wife, Kendra, and I explored together. Asfar back as Washington University, in the mid-twentieth century, we were founding members of theorganization CORE, the Committee on Racial Equality, and we gave it a lot of our energy, first of allintegrating the university, which had been segregated, and integrating public places by going asinterracial groups to restaurants, swimming pools, and so on. That’s one aspect of the tenth frontier,but there are two more.

When China invaded Tibet, both of us took on the cause of the Tibetans in that time of their greatordeal. We’ve sponsored five families and even now have a Tibetan single parent in our mother-in-

law apartment downstairs. But what I want to mention particularly is that, in my research on theTibetans, I came upon the only empirical discovery of my career, namely a very extraordinary modeof chanting developed by the Tibetans, which has introduced a new term into the lexicography ofmusicology: “multiphonic chanting.” It produces more than one tone, in fact three, a tonic chord—afirst, a third, and a fifth—issuing from one larynx.

The third aspect of the justice frontier has been the Native American Church. In April, 1990, theSupreme Court issued a decision that stripped that church of its constitutional right to exist because itssacrament is peyote, which in our irrational drug laws is scheduled right up there with crack, cocaine,and heroin, though it is impossible to become addicted to peyote, and not a single misdemeanor, letalone crime, has ever been traced to its use. Contrast that with the sacrament of Christianity, which isalcohol: despite the toll it takes, it can be emblazoned on billboards because that’s our sacrament.But since the sacrament of the Native Americans is instead peyote, it is not permitted. I spent twoyears helping Reuben Snake edit One Nation under God: The Triumph of the Native Church, whichhelped that church win back its right to exist.

Those have been my three issues on the frontier of justice: racial justice, the cause of theTibetans, and the cause of the Native American Church.

11. I have to double back in time to mention my eleventh frontier, which some may consider adisreputable part of my journey. Through my friend, Aldous Huxley, I became introduced to what usedto be called psychedelic substances. Because their use careened in a crazy way during thepsychedelic 1960s, those who are interested in seriously exploring dimensions of the mind that thisvery small class of nonaddictive substances can open up have adopted a new term for them:entheogens, a word suggesting “God enabling.”

I was at MIT when research on those substances began in the early 1960s. And, again,responding to an inner urge, I crossed that frontier and participated in the research while it was notonly legal, but respectable—the research being at Harvard University. William James and AldousHuxley both say that it is impossible to close our accounts on reality without taking account of theregions of the mind that are brought to light through such substances, and I agree with them. After ahalf-dozen or so ingestions I followed Alan Watts’ advice, “When you get the message, hang up.” Butmy experiences prompted me to notice the way these substances (and other techniques for alteringbrain chemistry, such as fasting and ecstatic dancing) have figured in religion’s history, and over thedecades I wrote ten essays on this subject which eventually came together in a book, Cleansing theDoors of Perception.

12. My last frontier relates to an issue I’ve touched on before, but one that has occupied animportant position in my mind throughout my career: understanding the nature of Ultimate Reality.Until the rise of modern science, all the peoples of the world believed not only in this world, but alsoin another world, which, although invisible, is more real and more important than this one—the worldpresented in Plato’s allegory of the cave, which depicts this world as only the shadows cast by atranscendent world.

Let me quickly put on my hat as a historian of religions and give you a quick Cook’s tour of thetraditional religious worldview, which has always included both this world and also another. In EastAsia, this world is Earth and the other world is Heaven, of which Confucius said, “Only Heaven is

great.” In South Asia, this everyday world is Samsara and the other world is Nirvana. In theAbrahamic religions, this world is the physical universe and the other world is its Creator—Yahweh,God, Allah.

When that worldview, which is unanimously affirmed in all the traditional religions, came faceto face with modern science, modern science demoted it. Because of the technological cornucopiascience provides, it retired the traditional view—not for everybody—certainly not for you and for me—but for our media barons and those, you might say, who rule the intellectual culture of our time. Tobe sure, many things in traditional worldviews deserve to be retired, for example, their views of thephysical universe, which has been permanently superceded by science, their social platforms ofslavery, caste, gender relationships, and so on. In those cases, let the dead bury their dead.

In the big picture, however—in the widest-angle lens we can have on reality—there is nothing inModernity or Postmodernity that equals the convergent wisdom of the world’s great religioustraditions. The biologist Edward O. Wilson has said that the battle between the religious andscientific worldviews will be the struggle for the human soul in the twenty-first century. He thinks thatthe scientific worldview will be victorious. I do not think that it will be, but I agree that that is acrucial issue of our time, with the current battlefront being whether Darwinism has the resources togive us the whole story of how we got here.

The fundamental issue in evolution is not origin, it’s anthropology, meaning who we are ashuman beings. The Darwinists say, “We are the more that have derived from the less.” Those whohold the religious view say, “We are the less who have derived from the more.” The latter believethat we are created in the image of God (or of whatever you wish to call the Divine), and that gives usa stature that cannot be produced by natural selection working on chance variation. Both views havepart of the truth, and, of course, the hope is that we can come to a reconciliation by acknowledgingthat fact. But at the moment the unfortunate thing is that Darwinians—I won’t say all, but the noisiestones—will not allow religion any foothold in accounting for life and the universe, other than possiblywhat caused the Big Bang. They say, if you want to believe that God caused that at the beginning, wellthat’s your right. But they will not allow any intermediate causes to be countenanced.

I come now to my close, and I have three closes, but only one sentence each. One is that of avery prominent Victorian lady whose name I forget. Her last words were, “It’s all been veryinteresting,” and that certainly is the case as I look back over my life. The second is that, the older Iget, the more the boundary between myself and my world appears perforated. There comes a timewhen I look back on the past I have traveled and say, “This is me”; look across the table at my wife offifty-six years and say, “This is me”; feel my broken hip and its replacement and say, “This is me.” Soit goes; the boundary between oneself and what one has experienced blurs. But I think the third closeis my favorite. It comes from Saint John Chrisostom, who at his death was said to have exclaimed,“Praise, praise for everything. Thanks, thanks for it all.”

Notes

Chapter Two

1. Langdon Gilkey, Religion and the Scientific Future (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 22.

2. William Sheldon, Psychology and the Promethean Will (New York: Harper and Row, 1936). Need this importance of orientation,and the relevance of worldviews thereto, be argued? A review of a recent book on Early Man and the Cosmos that summarizesthe hybrid field of archaeoastronomy emphasizes that “ancient astronomers were more than detached observers. They searched forthe meaning of human existence in the ordered patterns of the stars. Their cosmologies encompassed the customs of entirecivilizations, providing a unified vision that gave form and meaning to the actions of people on earth.”

3. My reading of Nietzsche is heavily vectored by George Grant’s 1969 Massey Lectures, “Time as History” (CBS Learning Systems,Box 500, Station A, Toronto M5W IE6). I also take seriously Hannah Arendt’s reading, as in this passage: “In The Twilight of Idols,[Nietzsche] clarifies what the word God meant. It was merely a symbol for the supersensual realm as understood by metaphysics;he now uses instead of God the word true world and says: ‘We have abolished the true world. What has remained? The apparentone perhaps? Oh, no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one’” (“Thinking and Moral Considerations,” SocialResearch 38 [Autumn 1971]: 240).

4. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 52.

5. As the earliest of our six deconstructers, Kant would say that metaphysics as heretofore conceived is no longer possible. Hissuccessors wax more categorical.

6. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), p. 142n.

7. James Cutsinger, “Toward a Method of Knowing Spirit,” Sciences Religieuses/Studies in Religion, 14/2 (Spring 1985), pp. 149,152.

8. Husserl could no more solve the problem of the “other” than could Kant, whose premises (Strawson argues) make the notion of anoumenal world incoherent from the outset. See J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 315-18; and P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Mathuen 1959), p. 42.

9. In his later years, Husserl softened on this point and admitted into consciousness the life-world in which man is plunged before hisintuition of essences congeals.

10. “Heidegger interprets [Plato’s] doctrine of ideas as the beginning of that forgetfulness of being that peaks…in the technological ageas the universal will to power.…But…the authentic dimension of the Platonic dialectic of ideas has a fundamentally differentmeaning. The underlying principle is a step beyond the simple minded acceptance of ideas and in the final analysis [is] a countermovement against the metaphysical interpretation of being as the being of existing beings” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, PhilosophicalApprenticeships [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985]). For Friedlander on Heidegger, see his Plato: An Introduction (PrincetonUniversity Press, 1969), passim.

11. Chapter Two of Robert Bernasconi, The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (New Jersey: Humanities Press,1985) is especially deserving of study in this connection. I am indebted to Jason Wirth for calling my attention to this work.

12. Herbert Dreyfus, “Knowledge and Human Values,” Teachers College Record, 82/3 (Spring 1981), p. 519.

13. Op. cit., p. 52.

14. “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics,” in Walter Kauffman (ed.), Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York:New American Library, 1956), p. 207. Or alternatively, “metaphysics begins by recognizing the difference between Being andbeings, but then takes Being to be that highest being which is the ground of the possibility and actuality of all beings” (Henry Ruf’sparaphrase of Heidegger in the book from which this essay is reprinted). To indicate how inadequate these definitions are, I mustcontent myself here with a single instance. In describing Plato’s metaphysics, Paul Friedlander writes: “At last still another dimensionbecomes visible above the level of being. As the cause of becoming is not in itself becoming, so the source of being is not in itselfbeing. Then we encounter the highest paradox: not itself being, but beyond being. While there is still knowledge about being…therecan be no knowledge about what is beyond being” (Plato: An Introduction) [Princeton University Press, 1969], p. 63.

15. On the issue of causality, I have it from Norris Clarke that on an occasion when Heidegger was pushed in a seminar on why hewould not countenance causality from a God beyond our finite horizons, he replied: “I am still too much of a Kantian to believe incausality. Participation, metaphysical causality—these are past mittences of Being to the medieval world. They are lost to us now.”

But as Father Clarke rightly continues in the letter to me that reported this confession: “How does one pretend to know andproclaim what Being is up to at a given time—what cards it is currently dealing from its deck? Could it not be that the signals have

already changed, and that Kantianism with its suspicion of causality has had its day?” A danger in historicism is the abject posture itcan induce toward time, leading us to assume that we are trapped in our historical moment and can do little to affect its character.

16. John Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1978), p. 266.

17. “Probably nothing has had greater impact on the way philosophers today understand the human mode of life than the acceptance…ofthe idea that we are social beings, that human language, thought, knowledge and morality are social and historical. Introduced in theWest as a viable hypothesis by Hegel, Marx and Dewey, the idea that we are social beings was diffused through every area ofphilosophy by Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein and Quine” (Henry Ruf in an unpublished paper).

18. Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

19. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 176.

20. Richard Bernstein is only one who has criticized “the type of…fashionable…pluralism…that thinks of different perspectives,paradigms, language-games, etc., as incommensurable—as window-less monads where there is no possibility of communicationamong them. This fortress-like pluralism,” he contends, “subscribes to what Karl Popper calls the ‘Myth of the Framework’ wherewe are presumably ’prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; our expectations; our past experiences; our language’ andare so locked into these frameworks that we cannot communicate with those encased in ‘radically’ different frameworks orparadigms. But while proponents of the incommensurability thesis do call into question naive assumptions about fixed, transcendentalstandards and criteria,…they fail to show that we cannot rationally communicate, confront, and argue with what is different andother” (1988 Presidential Address to the Metaphysical Society of America).

21. Ernest Gellner, “The Stakes in Anthropology,” The American Scholar (Winter 1988), p. 19.

22. Timothy Jackson, Religious Studies Review, Vol. 11, No. 3 (July 1985).

23. Someone has written that it would be quite false “to assume with the subjectivists, that there is no adequate knowledge, for that is toforget that adequation constitutes the sufficient reason for the intelligence and thus its very essence; even a limited knowledge isadequate to the exact degree that it is a knowledge and not something else.”

24. “While the problem of objective worth for the physical or natural sciences is an absence of value in the world described by them, theproblem of objective worth for the social science and hermeneutics is just the opposite, too much value—too many cultures, formsof life, language games, too many competing systems of value, and no way to tell which is the right one” (Robert Kane,“Metaphysical Ends,” an unpublished paper).

25. “ ‘Realism’…is the view that truth is radically non-epistemic, that truth is not determined solely by consciousness, linguisticconventions, conditions of evidence, verifiability, or warranted assertibility, even in the long run. It is determined by the way the worldis and this is independent in some sense of our ways of knowing that world” (Robert Kane, in the paper previously cited). Kane goeson to point out that realism in this sense is intimately related to the fallibilism its opponents so vociferously defend, for it is realismthat insists most emphatically that truth is underdetermined by the conditions of belief and evidence of knowing subjects.

26. Even Derrida concedes that “language is marked through and through by referential…assumptions.…What he seeks[s] to show…isthat classical ideas of this referential function have greatly simplified its nature” [Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1987), p. 54.] This could be so.

27. Harvey Cox, Christianity and Crisis, April 15, 1985, p. 140.

28. Ihab Hassan, as cited by Albrect Wellmer, “On the Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism”’ Praxis International 4:338.

29. Richard Bernstein, “Metaphysics, Critique, Utopia,” in Review of Metaphysics, XLII/2, p. 259.

30. Ibid., p. 260.

Chapter Three

1. Aldous Huxley, The Pereniial Philosophy, New York: Harper and Row, 1945/1990, p. vii.

2. This sentence is not intended to disown the missionary enterprise. In 1982 I attended a service of worship in a church my familyfrequented in the 1920s and 30s when we passed through Shanghai. Two thousand parishioners were in attendance. In addition tothe sanctuary which was packed, sixteen amplified Sunday school rooms were overflowing and the minister pled with thecongregation not to attend church more than once on a Sunday because doing so deprived others of the privilege. To gaze on thefaces in that congregation, many streaming with tears, while remembering the twenty-eight years of persecution the church in Chinahad suffered before its doors had been permitted to reopen two years before my visit, was to know that Christianity was providing atleast these people with something their indigenous tradition did not, and perhaps to them could not. This is to say nothing of the

incalculable debt I myself owe to dedicated Indian, Japanese, Tibetan, and Islamic teachers who have made America their missionfield.

3. Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions (Wheaton, 111: Theosophical Publishing. House, 1984), p. 20.

4. Huxley, ibid.

5. Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), p. 59.

6. “The ability to see the Great Truth of the hierarchic structure of the world, which makes it possible to distinguish between higher andlower Levels of Being, is one of the indispensable conditions of understanding” (E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, p.14).

7. Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up (New York: Vintage Press, 1979), pp. 289–90.

8. To cite a single compelling example, “There is some principle of organization of living matter that is shared with no other naturalassemblage of atoms.…Despite a knowledge of the structure of protein molecules down to the very placement of their atoms inexact three-dimensional space, we do not have the faintest idea of what the rules are for folding them up into their natural form” (R.C. Lewontin, in The New York Review, April 27, 1989, p. 18).

9. Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 59, 26.

10. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902).

11. _____, Some Problems of Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1911), p. 101.

12. Obviously the terms “visible” and “invisible” refer here not merely to the ocular sense, but to all of our senses of outwardobservation. The powers of life, consciousness, and self-awareness are entirely invisible (without color, sound, taste, or smell) whilebeing—this is important—what we are mainly interested in. All our thoughts, emotions, feelings, imaginations, reveries, dreams,fantasies, are invisible, and this has implications that are more startling than we normally realize. As it is these interior features thatwe identify with most—take ourselves at heart to be—we are invisible; we live in a world of invisible people. I have not chosen thatway of putting the matter for its shock value. No verbal legerdemain is involved; only the insistence that we face the implications ofthe way we actually, workingly, think of ourselves. It would be an oversimplification to say that we are completely invisible, for wedo have bodies; but as between oversimplifications, it is literally more accurate to say that we are invisible than to say the opposite.

13. Quoted in Harold Schilling, The New Consciousness in Science and Religion (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1973), p. 110.

14. Arthur Young, Which Way Out? (Berkeley: Robert Briggs Associates, 1980), p. 2. In David Bohm’s formulation: “If one computesthe amount of energy that would be in one cubic centimetre of space, with…the shortest wavelength that should be considered ascontributing to the ‘zero-point’ energy of space…it turns out to be very far beyond the total energy of all the matter in the knownuniverse” (Wholeness and the Implicate Order [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 190–91).

15. J. E. Lovelock, Gaia (Oxford University Press. 1979), as quoted in Lewis Thomas, “Debating the Unknowable,” The AtlanticMonthly, July 1981, p. 51.

16. Thomas, ibid.

17. See section titled “The Possibility of Certitude” in chapter 10.

18. What lies beyond belief altogether! “The starkness of…an incommensurable split between, on the one side, language and the worldincluded in language, and, on the other side, the unsayable and the world as unsayable (sheer existence, immediacy of content,voiceless physiognomies, confronting the I)” was Wittgenstein’s central vision and lifelong obsession (Henry Le Roy Finch,Wittgenstein: The Later Philosophy [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1977], p. 242).

19. Robert Coles, “The Limits of Psychiatry,” The Progressive, May 1967, pp. 32–33.

20. Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 7.

21. Jacob Needleman, “Why Philosophy Is Easy,” Review of Metaphysics 22, no. 1 (September 1968): 3–4.

22. Ernest Gellner, The Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 206.

23. Occasionally we find a modern philosopher echoing this link between ethics and outlook, such as William James: “Practice maychange our theoretical horizon, and this in a twofold way: it may lead into new worlds and secure new powers. Knowledge we couldnever attain, remaining what we are, may be attainable in consequence of higher powers and a higher life, which we may morallyachieve.” (Quoted in Aldous Huxley, Perennial Philosophy, p. viii.)

There are also Wittgenstein’s famous assertions: “The philosopher’s treatment…is like the treatment of an illness.…Sickness…is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings…Pretensions are a mortgage which burdens a philosopher’s capacity tothink” (Compiled from Philosophical Investigations, p. 225; Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, p. 57; and OnCertainty, p. 549.) Well and good, but what does modern philosophy do with such occasional asides? What is the altered “mode of

life” that is intimated? How is it achieved?

24. “Virtue…is necessary, for light does not go through an opaque stone and barely illuminates a black wall; so man must become likecrystal or like snow, but without pretending that snow is light” (Frithjof Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts [London:Perennial Books, 1969], p. 178).

25. Donald Campbell, from the prospectus of a seminar on “Social Evolution and the Authority of Religious Tradition.”

Chapter Four

1. Huston Smith, “Teaching to a Camera,” Educational Record, January 1956.

2. Expanded, it was published as Huston Smith, Condemned to Meaning (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

3. Huston Smith, “The Humanities and Man’s Condition,” Liberal Education 50, no. 2 (May 1964).

4. ———, “Two Kinds of Teaching,” in Thomas Buxton and Keith Prichard, Excellence in University Teaching (Columbia, S.C.:University of South Carolina Press, 1975); reprinted in Key Reporter 38, no. 4 (Summer 1973), and in Journal of HumanisticPsychology 15, no. 4 (Fall 1975).

5. ———, “Like It Is: The University Today,” Key Reporter 34, no. 2 (Winter 1968–1969). Reprinted in Wall Street Journal, 20March 1969.

6. ———, “Values: Academic and Human,” in The Larger Learning, ed. Marjorie Carpenter (Dubuque, Iowa: William C. Brown,1969); and Huston Smith, “Education beyond the Facts,” (Charleston, W.V.: Morris Harvey College, 1962).

7. Cf. René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1972), and this statement by Gerald Holton: “Thedifficulty has perhaps been not that this new way [of separating primary quantifiable properties from secondary qualitative ones] wastoo hard, but that it turned out to be all too easy. Once the scientists of the seventeenth century had found the key to this particulargate, the road that opened beyond led more speedily and deeply into remote and fascinating territory, further from the original groundof understanding the world” (Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought [Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1973], p. 440).

8. “Entire” overstates the case slightly, but not much. Mary Douglas tells us in Natural Symbols that every type of society, from themost secular to the most religious, can be found in the tribal world, but my point concerns proportions.

9. A quick review of the signification that led up to the current meaning of our word science can help orient us for what follows.Scientia in the classical world meant “reasoned disclosure of something for the sake of the disclosure itself.” Up to the seventeenthcentury such disclosure consisted largely of classifications of things that were qualitatively different, but after Galileo it became thesearch for nature’s quantitative laws. The German Wissenschaft, however, continues to carry broader denotations than our Englishword science and includes all scholarly disciplines; it is in this German sense, for example, that Marxism claimed to be scientific. It ismy contention that our English word has come to refer basically to what goes on in the natural or empirical sciences and theirmathematical underpinnings. In saying that “physics is a science,” no one feels it necessary to warn his hearers that he means that itis a natural science, whereas “sociology is a science” will provoke dispute if the qualifying adjective social, functioning here as adiminutive, is not added.

10. B. F. Skinner stands as a parody of the lengths to which science’s concern for predictability can drive a man. When it was suggestedto him sometime back that it would be a mistake for psychology to take a position on determinism that the Heisenberg Principle hadshown to be unsupportable in physics, Skinner replied that the “muddle of physics” was physics’ worry, not psychology’s. From thefact that electrons are unpredictable, he seemed to be saying, it doesn’t follow that human behavior cannot be predicted. See T. W.Mann, ed., Behaviorism and Phenomenology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 139–40.

11. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 21.

12. Sir Charles Sherrington, Man on His Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 251.

13. That paragraph was written twenty years ago. In that interval—through centers and institutes such as Berkeley’s Center forTheology and the Natural Sciences, their house organ, Zygon, and the coffers of The Templeton Foundation—the emphasis hasshifted to seeing how far theological claims can be stated in scientific terms. That move will be dealt with in chapter 7, below.

14. An example at hand: The item I wrote just before starting this present essay was a review of Bollingen’s two-volume posthumouscompilation of the writings of A. K. Coomaraswamy, so I looked up John Kenneth Galbraith’s review of the set in The New YorkTimes Book Review. It was delightful, of course, but he dismissed the second volume of the set, which contains Coomaraswamy’smetaphysical writings, with a single sentence: “It worries me in stating as true what can only be imagined” (12 March 1978).

15. E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 1.

16. Ibid., p. 8.

17. “If anything characterizes ‘modernity,’ it is a loss of faith in transcendence, in a reality that encompasses but surpasses our quotidianaffairs,” we read in “Review of Facing Up to Modernity by Peter Berger,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 January 1978,p. 18.

Because this quotation spots the exact phenomenon that prompted the writing of these essays, it will be cited several times in thecourse of this book.

18. “We are the only people who think themselves risen from savages; everyone else believes they descended from gods,” MarshallSahlins tells us in Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). And from Saul Bellow’s 1976 NobelPrize address: “We do not think well of ourselves; we do not think amply about what we are.…It is the jet plane in which wecommonplace human beings have crossed the Atlantic in four hours that embodies such values as we can claim.”

19. It has also rendered us as a species more vulnerable, but that has only recently come to light.

20. Ernest Gellner, The Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 206.

21. Ibid., pp. 206–7.

22. In Sartre’s formulation when “real knowledge” is taken to be the kind Gellner is describing, human life becomes “absurd.”

23. Ibid., p. 207.

24. Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Consideration,” Social Research 38 (Autumn 1971): 240.

25. Ibid.

26. Taylor Branch, “New Frontiers in American Philosophy,” New York Times Magazine, 14 August 1978.

27. Quine sees ontological positions—what is finally real—as relative precisely because they cannot be objectively grounded, and Kripkehas written as follows: “Materialism, I think, must hold that a physical description of the world is a complete description of it, that anymental facts are ‘ontologically ‘dependent’ on physical facts in the straightforward sense of following from them by necessity. Noidentity theorists [materialists] seem to me to have made a convincing argument against the intuitive view that this is not the case.”(closing section of his “Naming and Necessity,” in D. Davidson and G. Harmon [eds.], Semantics of Natural Language[Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972]).

28. For the reason why persons who are seeking “effective knowledge” (Gellner’s phrase) are required to charge persons who workfrom alternative metaphysical premises with “begging the question,” see my discussion of D. C. Dennett’s work in Forgotten Truth:The Primordial Tradition (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 135ff.

29. Adam Smith, New York Times Book Review, 18 September 1977, p. 10.

30. Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Understanding and Social Inquiry, ed. Fred Dallmayr and ThomasMcCarthy (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 124.

31. Robert Ackerman, “J. G. Frazer Revisited,” American Scholar, Spring 1978, p. 232.

32. Irving Yalom, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 85.

33. Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” op. cit., pp. 105–6.

34. May Brodbeck, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 2 of the “GeneralIntroduction.”

35. Thomas Lawson, unpublished paper, 1974.

36. Alston Chase, “Skipping through College: Reflections on the Decline of Liberal Arts Education,” The Atlantic Monthly, September1978, p. 38.

37. Kathleen Raine, “Premises and Poetry,” Sophia Perennis 3, no. 2 (Autumn 1977): 58–60.

38. Canadian Geographer 22, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 66–67.

39. As these words go to press, something has come to my attention that suggests that philosophy, which in a sense is epistemology’scustodian, may itself be starting to recover from the unautonomous way it has related to science thus far in this century. In Reason,Truth and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981), Hilary Putnam, chairman of the Philosophy Department at Harvard, argues:(1) that it is time for philosophy to lay aside the debunking posture that has characterized it for the last fifty years; (2) that thematerialism that virtually is its current metaphysics and the empiricism that is its epistemology are both inadequate; (3) that its biggestpresent job is to develop a model of rationality more adequate than the three present contenders—inductive logic, relativism, andinnate ideas à la Chomsky; and (4) this new model should be one that establishes philosophy as a cognitive domain situated betweenscience on the one hand and art on the other.

And Richard Rorty, in what may be the most important philosophical work of the 1970s, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature(Princeton University Press, 1979), asks philosophers to renounce their claim to being authorities on epistemology. Instead, theyshould turn to the hermeneutic task of facilitating conversation between different worlds of discourse.

40. Manfred Stanley, “Beyond Progress: Three Post-Political Futures” in Images of the Future, ed. Robert Bundy (Buffalo: PrometheusBooks, 1976), pp. 115–16.

41. Kurt Wolff, “Surrender, and Autonomy and Community,” Humanitas 1, no. 2 (Fall 1965): 77. See also his “Surrender as a Responseto Our Crisis,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 2 (1962): 16–30; and Surrender and Catch (Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1976).

42. Numerology is a special case that need not concern us here. In 2 + 2 = 4 numbers function as signs, but in “God is one,” one is asymbol.

43. Paul Ricoeur points out the irony in the phrase “symbolic logic,” which, as the name for our ultimate, formal, abstract exactitude,exactly inverts symbolism’s usual meaning (The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan [Boston: Beacon Press, 1969], p. 17).

44. Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1974), p. 111.

45. Gregory Bateson, interviewed by Daniel Goleman, “Breaking Out of the Double Bind,” Psychology Today, August 1978, p. 51.

Chapter Five

1. There are two fairly extended quotations which, because they speak so precisely to the points they make, I use more than once inthese essays which were written for different audiences. That by Ernest Gellner, which puts its finger on our current epistemology, isone of these; it appeared in the preceding essay and will reappear in this one. The other, which identifies the consequences of thatepistemology, is this present statement by Manfred Stanley, which appeared previously on page 96, and in its present entry willresume on the next page.

2. Manfred Stanley, “Beyond Progress: Three Post-Political Futures,” in Images of the Future, ed. Robert Bundy (Buffalo: PrometheusBooks, 1976), pp. 115–16.

3. Christopher Lasch gives us one indication of this in The Culture of Narcissism which has as its subtitle, American Life in an Age ofDiminishing Expectations. Saul Bellow’s assessment was quoted on pp. 256–57, n. 18 above, and another Nobel Prize winner, theneurophysiologist John Eccles, has this to say: Man is not just “a hastily made-over ape.…Science has gone too far in breaking downour belief in our spiritual greatness” (Brain/Mind Bulletin [20 February 1978], p. 4).

4. A certain metaphysical sensitivity is needed to see this—a talent for the long view—but the point must rest here with an analogy.From their beginning, stars struggle against the force of their own gravity, which they can oppose only by generating tremendousamounts of energy to maintain high internal pressures. But the star can never win the battle, for when its fuel is exhausted, gravitywins and the star must die.

5. In his God and Other Minds (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), Alvin Plantinga says he does not know how to arguethe existence of God, whose existence seems as obvious to him as anything he might try to argue it from.

6. “I am so afraid of error that I keep hurling myself into the arms of doubt rather than into the arms of truth” (Petrarch).

7. Epigraph of Carolly Erickson’s The Medieval Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

8. “Insight is an act, permeated by intense passion, that makes possible great clarity in the sense that it perceives and dissolves subtlebut strong emotional, social, linguistic, and intellectual pressures tending to hold the mind in rigid grooves and fixed compartments, inwhich fundamental challenges are avoided. From this germ can unfold a further perception that includes new orders and forms ofreason that are expressed in the medium of thought and language” (David Bohm, “On Insight and its Significance for Science,Education, and Values,” Teachers College Record 80, no. 3 [1979]: 409).

9. Edward Norman, Christianity and the World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 6.

10. Alex Comfort, I and That (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979), pp. 69–70. It is not likely that this estimate of religion’s importance,coming as it does from the author of The Joy of Sex, is skewed by excess piety.

11. Bryan Wilson, Contemporary Transformations of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 100.

12. Ernest Gellner, The Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 206–7.

13. “Despair is, theologically considered, not only a sin but the greatest of sins; and yet at the same time there is a sort of pride in it, apleasure even, as in the only great thing left to us. It is also a kind of revenge on those whom we imagine have driven us to it”(Kathleen Raine).

14. Cezlaw Milosz thinks we do not have the requisite vitality, living as we do in a time when great art is no longer possible.

15. “Plato understood that all attempts to form a nobler type of man—i.e., all paideai and all culture—merge into the problem of thenature of the divine” (Werner Jaeger).

16. It was the corridors of power that yawned before Bacon and his cohorts in the seventeenth century that made science so heady.Forming their Invisible College, they divided power into three kinds. Power over themselves science did not seem to offer. Powerover others it did dangle, but in the imperialism and colonialism it foreshadowed there seemed to be moral ambiguities, so theyscratched this topic, too, from their agenda. It was power over nature that excited them as the unqualified good science was deedingto humanity.

17. A scientist has written that whatever we consider ultimate reality to be, one of the reasons we find it to be mysterious and aweinspiring is precisely “its failure to present itself as the perfect and articulate consequence of rational thought” (Henry Margenau inPaul Schilpp, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959], p. 250).

18. Gilbert Durand, “On the Disfiguration of the Image of Man in the West,” monograph published by Golgonooza Press, Ipswich, 1977.

19. Laurens van der Post, The Heart of the Hunter (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), p. 188.

20. Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (New York: New American Library, 1950), p. 120.

21. John Findlay, in Alasdair MacIntyre, ed., Hegel (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), pp. 19–20.

22. William Golding, Free Fall (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), p. 188.

Chapter Six

1. Hilary Putnam, “After Empiricism,” in John Rajchman & Cornet West (Eds.), Post-Analytic Philosophy (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1985), p. 28.

2. “Scientism, Pragmatism, and the Fate of Philosophy;” Inquiry, 29, p. 278. I have converted Nielsen’s rhetorical questions intostraightforward assertions.

3. From an address, “Philosophy: Past Conflict and Future Direction,” delivered to the Pacific Division of the American PhilosophicalAssociation in March, 1987.

4. Richard Rorty, “Eleventh Inter-American Congress of Philosophy,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, Vol.59 (July 1986), p. 748.

5. Ibid., p. 749.

6. Kai Nielsen, “The Withering Away of the Tradition;” a paper delivered at the meeting of the APA mentioned in endnote 3.

7. George Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 34.

8. For the clearest statement of the difference between theoretical and practical holism, see Hubert Dreyfus, “Holism andHermeneutics,” in Robert Hollinger (Ed.), Hermeneutics and Praxis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985).

9. Hubert Dreyfus’ paraphrase of Wittgenstein in ibid., p. 235.

10. David Pears in The New Republic, May 19, 1986, p. 3.

11. See Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). For a critique ofWittgenstein’s position on this point, see Ernest Gellner, “The Gospel According to Ludwig,” The American Scholar, Spring 1984.

Chapter Seven

1. To repeat a quotation I used in an earlier essay, “There is no doubt that in developed societies education has contributed to the declineof religious belief” (Edward Norman, Christianity and the World Order [New York: Oxford University Press 1979], p. 6).

2. This model is presented diagramatically on p.76 above.

3. They were noted in the essay “Excluded Knowledge,” but are repeated here in slightly different form.

4. Frances Bacdon, Works, ed. J. Spedding and R. L. Ellis (London, 1858), vol. 4, p. 365.

5. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 21.

6. The current (as I write these lines) issue of the Scientific American confirms this nonprogress with respect to qualities. Its article byJerry Fodor on “The Mind-Body Problem” espouses functionalism as the most promising current approach to understanding mentalstates and operations, but concedes that “the functionalist account does not work for mental states that have qualitative content”(Vol. 243, no. 7 [January 1981] p. 122).

7. This second demonstration appears three times in these essays, in “Excluded Knowledge,” here, and in “Beyond the ModernWestern Mind-Set.” I have retained it in all three places because (as I noted in my Preface), quite apart from the holes that wouldresult if it were removed, the repetitions serve a constructive purpose. The argument they condense is complex, and as it is crucialfor perceiving the limitations of our current mind-set, it is important that it sink in. I hope its force will mount each time the argumentis repeated.

8. I am not overlooking the rational, mathematical component in science, but the crucial role of the controlled experiment givesempiricism the edge.

9. That modern epistemology so aims was documented in “Excluded Knowledge.” I shall not reproduce here the evidence I thereassembled; it will be enough to refer the reader to Ernest Gellner’s summary verdict on pp. 88–89 above.

10. Human beings must be kept in the dark if they are to be subjects for controlled experiments in regions where they are free. Buttranscendental subjects, if they exist, cannot be kept in the dark. By definition they know more than we do.

11. On reading this statement, the physicist-theologian William Pollard wrote to me: “But science does not see the significance of chanceand therein lies its Achilles Heel.” He probes this point powerfully in his Science and Transcendence, his contribution to the EricRust Festschrift, Creation through Alternative Histories, and his Chance and Providence.

12. Martin Heidegger appears to have been the first to work out this difference clearly. My account here is indebted to Hubert Dreyfus’streatment of the matter in his “Holism and Hermeneutics,” Review of Metaphysics 34, no. 1 (September 1980).

13. Wilfred Sellars, Science Perception, and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), p. 173.

14. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956).

15. It is interesting to find the word hermeneutics, and names like Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, now surfacing in the philosophyof science.

16. I use this word to refer, not to the proven facts of biology and the fossil record, but to the theory (assumed to be established by thosefacts) which claims that natural selection working on chance mutations adequately accounts for how we got here. No majortheologian I know is currently challenging this doctrine—“the most influential teaching of the modern age,”’ as E. F. Schumachercalls it—leaving it to Billy Graham and fundamentalist creationists on the one hand, and concerned laymen like Schumacher himselfand secularists like Arthur Koestler on the other, to expose this “crumbling citadel,” as Koestler calls it. The next chapter of thisbook is devoted entirely to this issue.

17. For my part, I find it more likely that our forefathers—less harried by life’s accelerated pace, less deluged and distracted byavalanches of information, less insulated from illness, death, and nature generally—had the theological edge. I find what Origen saidof St. Paul, that he understood Moses far better than we can, altogether plausible.

18. Since I wrote this essay, process theologian David Griffin and I have written a book-length debate on this point: Perennial Truth andProcess Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989). See also my Bellarmine Lecture, “Has Process Theology Dismantled ClassicalTheism?,” Theology Digest, 34 (Winter 1988): 4.

19. In the following statement, John Cobb seems to withdraw ultimacy from God altogether: “The direction is to accept without hesitationor embarrassment the distinction between ultimate reality and God, and to recognize that the God of the Bible…is a manifestation ofultimate reality—not the name of that reality” (“Can a Christian Be a Buddhist, Too?” Japanese Religions, December 1978, p. 11).

20. Schubert Ogden claims that process theology has achieved “something like a Heideggerian ‘dismantling’ (Destruktion) of the historyof philosophical theology” (The Reality of God [New York: Harper and Row, 1977], p. 48).

21. Jeremy Bernstein in American Scholar 48 (Winter 1978–1979): 8.

22. Relativity theory requires continuity, strict causality, and locality. Quantum theory requires noncontinuity, noncausality, and nonlocality.

23. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 176.

24. Chapter 5 of my Forgotten Truth is devoted to the symbolic power latent in science today.

Chapter Eight

1. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 17.

2. I find myself in an awkward position here, for though I wish to extricate the Great Origins thesis from the Creationists’ clutches, inways they have my respect. Their deep commitment to one version of the Great Origins doctrine has made them more vigilant thanother theologians in spotting places where Darwinism rides on faith rather than fact.

An important chapter in the sociology of knowledge is being written; one in which establishment forces as represented by theuniversity, the American Civil Liberties Union, and mainline churches will not, in the eyes of history, emerge as heroes. I touch onthese issues in Huston Smith, “Scientism in Sole Command,” Christianity and Crisis, 21 January 1982; and in Huston Smith,“Evolution and Evolutionism,” The Christian Century, 7–14 July 1982.

3. Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1931), pp. 6–7.

4. I enter again Saul Bellow’s verdict from his 1976 Nobel Laureate lecture that was earlier registered: “The intelligent public is waitingto hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, and social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science: abroader, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. Ifwriters do not come into the center it will not be because the center is preempted. It is not.”

5. The conclusion of Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), as summarized in Don Cupitt, Worldsof Science and Religion (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1976), p. 12.

6. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. “Evolution.”

7. E. F. Schumacher, Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 100–10.

8. Cupitt, Worlds of Science and Religion, op. cit., p. 1.

9. Monod, Chance and Necessity, op. cit., p. 21, emphasis his.

10. Victor Ferkiss, review of Algeny by Jeremy Rifkin, Environment 25 (July-August 1983): 44.

11. Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried (Boston: Gambit, 1971).

12. Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (New York: Viking Press, 1983), p. 130.

13. Philip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 1993, and The Wedge of Truth, 2002, both published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL.

14. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. “Evolution.”

15. Pierre Grassé, Evolution of Living Forms (New York: Academic Press, 1977), pp. 202, 206.

16. Edwin Conklin, Man Real and Ideal (New York: Scribner’s, 1943), p. 52.

17. David Raup, “Conflicts between Darwin and Paleontology,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 50 (1979): 24.

18. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: J. M. Dent, 1971), p. 239.

19. Raup, “Conflicts between Darwin and Paleontology,” p. 26.

20. David Kitts, “Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory,” Evolution 28 (1974): 467. Darwinists must produce a family tree, a pedigree,Norman Macbeth observed on the Nova program earlier referred to, “and I regret to say that after 120 years they haven’t produceda single solid phylogeny.”

21. Stephan Jay Gould, with Niles Eldredge, “Punctuated Equilibria,” Paleobiology 3 (1977): 115.

22. Luther Burbank, quoted in Macbeth, Darwin Retried, p. 35.

23. Loren Eiseley, quoted in Macbeth, Darwin Retried, p. 36.

24. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), pp. 341–42.

25. Stephen Jay Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History 86 (June-July 1977): 24.

26. ———, “The Evolutionary Biology of Constraint,” Daedalus 29 (1980): 46.

27. C. H. Waddington, The Strategy of Genes (London: Allen & Unwin, 1957), pp. 64–65.

28. Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, p. 316.

29. Stephen J. Gould, Unitarian-Universalist World, 2 February 1982.

30. Transcript of “Speech by Dr. Colin Patterson at the American Museum of Natural History” (New York City, Nov. 5, 1981).

31. Gould, Unitarian-Universalist World, op. cit.

32. James Gleick, “Stephen Jay Gould: Breaking Tradition with Darwin,” New York Times Magazine, 20 November 1983, p. 50.

Chapter Nine

1. “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies” (Amos 5:21). “Lower…knowledge (is) of…ceremonials” (Mandaka Upanishad, italics added).

2. Heinz Kloppenburg, in “The Civilization of the Dialogue,” an Occasional Paper published by the Center for the Study of DemocraticInstitutions, Santa Barbara, California, p. 21.

3. Will D. Campbell & James Y. Holloway, Christianity and Crisis, XXIX, 3 (March 3, 1969), p. 36.

Chapter Ten

1. I am not overlooking the rational, mathematical component in science, but the crucial role of the controlled experiment givesempiricism the edge. One thinks of the opposition that as fine a mind as Chomsky’s has faced because his “Cartesian” linguisticsleans toward rationalism.

2. See John Wheeler’s address to the American Physical Society as summarized in Walter Sullivan, “Smallest of the Small,” New YorkTimes, 5 February 1967.

3. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). Professor Bohm was in the audiencewhen the initial draft of this paper was presented. When I came to this line I was gratified to see him nod in agreement.

4. That current epistemology is geared to control has been argued in earlier essays, so I shall not remarshall the evidence here. Seeespecially pp. 88–89 above.

5. Signs of this are everywhere, but I shall confine myself to a single example, drawn from a participant at the Woodstock symposium.Owen Barfield pointed out that “the eighteenth century essay was allowed…to ‘bring in’ religion [i.e., transcendence], which isexactly what the twentieth century was not allowed to do. Not on any account” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion47/2, Supplement (June 1979): 221–22).

6. Reductionism is the belief that human activities can be “reduced” to and explained by the behavior of lower animals, and that these inturn can be reduced to the physical laws that govern inanimate matter. For a full-scale critique of this belief, see Arthur Koestler andJames Smythies, Beyond Reductionism (New York: Macmillan, 1970).

7. I do not know the author of this quatrain. It was chalked on the blackboard at a meeting of graduate students I recently attended.

8. Daniel Dennett, “Review of The Self and Its Brain by Karl Popper and John Eccles,” Journal of Philosophy 76, no. 2 (February1979): 97.

9. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), p. 7.

10. Harold Morowitz, “Rediscovering the Mind,” Psychology Today 14, no. 2 (August 1980): 14.

11. Francis Crick, Of Molecules and Men (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966).

12. Morowitz, op. cit., p. 12.

13. Annette J. Smith, “Playing with Play: A Test Case of ‘Ethocriticism,’ “Journal of Biological Structures I no. 11 (1978): 199.

14. Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951).

15. D. Elkins, ed., Six Psychological Studies (New York: Random House, 1967).

16. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, vol. 1 (New York: Basic Books, 1969), emphasis added.

17. “The emotions we feel, which in exceptional individuals may climax in total self-sacrifice, stem ultimately from hereditary units thatwere implanted by the favoring of relatives during a period of thousands of generations” (Edward O. Wilson, “Altruism,” HarvardMagazine, November-December 1978).

18. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology, abr. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 3.

19. These friends cannot be four-footed, feathered, or furry though—much less leafy and flowery. To be kind to the point of sacrificinghuman interests for these—restraining our predatory impulses towards the whales, say—is irrational, for in genetic ethics (theopening section of Sociobiology is titled “The Morality of the Gene”) “rational” is what favors species survival.

It is irrational to defer to other species unless there is a gene that has caught on to the fact that species need environments tosustain them—I enter this suggestion on my own to caricature the lengths to which sociobiology has already stretched evidence in

the interests of theory (see Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism; Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, and Stuart Hampshire, “TheIllusion of Sociobiology,” The New York Review of Books, 12 October 1978). Wilson is now quoted as saying that by gene he doesnot mean the actual physical entities we can see with electron microscopes. Officially, he claims only that biological findings mightplausibly be used to explain human behavior. But his suggestion meshes so neatly with current styles of explanation that a droppedhint is enough to place its author in vast demand. Sociologists and psychologists are already working with sociobiological hypothesesas if they were tested theories—Pierre van den Berghe and David Barash are examples.

20. Barbara Brown, Supermind (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 199.

21. D. and C. Johnson, “Totally Discouraged: A Depressive Syndrome of the Dakota Sioux,” Transcultural Psychiatric ResearchReview, no. 2 (1965): 141–43.

22. Or the collapse of any worldview with a religious component, for that matter. Edward Wilson says sociobiology is forced to concludethat “the predisposition to religious belief is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind”; but whereas elsewherecomplexity is a biological virtue, here it shows only that the religious impulse is “in all probability ineradicable” (Edward O. Wilson,On Human Nature [New York: Bantam Books, 1978], p. 176).

23. Anthony Marsella, “Depressive Experience and Disorder across Cultures,” in Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology, ed. HarryTriandis and Jurgis Draguns, vol. 6 (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1980), p. 254. I am indebted to Kendra Smith for pointing me to thereferences in this section.

24. Ibid., p. 255.

25. “Psychology, or at least American psychology, is a second-rate discipline. The main reason is that it does not stand in awe of itssubject matter. Psychologists have too little respect for psychology” (James Gibson, as quoted in The New York Review of Books[Jan. 19, 1989], p. 15).

26. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, published as A World Split Apart (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).

27. Ibid., p. 35.

28. Ibid., p. 5.

29. Ibid., p. 47; emphasis added.

30. Ibid., pp. 47–49; emphasis added. “It could also be called anthropocentricity,” he adds, “with man seen as the center of it all” (P. 49).On the day that I found myself writing these lines, a letter reached me from a former student relating an anecdote from his

freshman philosophy course at Harvard University. It seems that when Emerson Hall (where the class met) was built, the philosophydepartment selected for the motto to be inscribed on its main wall, “Man is the measure of all things.” President Eliot however, wasof a different mind, and what actually appeared was, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?”

The occasion for the student’s note to me was a return visit to his alma mater. He found that vines had obscured the inscription,leaving only three words visible, those words being “that Thou art” the claim (in its Vedantic formulation) that man is indissolublyjoined to the Absolute. I shall return to that in section V, 4 below.

31. Ibid., p. 35.

32. I refer the reader to what Gellner calls the “mechanistic insistence” of an epistemology that aims at power; see p. 89 above.

33. In Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976), JosephWeisenbaum, another participant in the Woodstock Symposium, warns of “the imperialism of instrumental reason” in our time.

34. “The deeply rooted belief in psychic freedom and choice is quite unscientific and must give ground before the claims of a determinismwhich governs mental life” (Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis [New York: Liveright, 1935], p. 95).

35. Allan Wheelis, “Will and Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 4, no. 2 (April 1956): 256.

36. Statement by David Bohm at the Woodstock Symposium, “Knowledge, Education, and Human Values” 1980.

37. See Howard E. Gruber, “Darwin’s ‘Tree of Nature’ and Other Images of Wide Scope,” in On Aesthetics in Science, ed. JudithWechsler (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1978). Images figures prominently in the Woodstock Symposium. Peter Abbs followed DavidBohm to argue the need for education “to restore the power of the living image, to confer on it a high epistemological status, to put italongside concept as one of the key ways in which we symbolize and then come to know our world.”

38. Gai Eaton, The King of the Castle, (London: Bodley Head, 1977), pp. 11–12.

39. To Edward Norman’s observation, quoted on pp. 108 above, that “there is no doubt that in developed societies education hascontributed to the decline of religious belief” Robert Bellah adds that the decline is not in religious belief only. “The deepestindictment of the university,” he told the Woodstock Symposium, “is that it erodes belief” generally.

40. Sociobiology provides an instance of such game playing. On the one hand, we are told that as human beings have been programmed

by their evolutionary history to be incorrigible mythmakers, we require conceptual systems that engage our loyalties; on the other,that these systems must “satisfy our urge for knowledge” (paraphrase of Edward O. Wilson, in Religious Studies Review 5, no. 2[April 1980]: 102). Whether a conceptual system our knowledge tells us is a myth can engage our loyalties is never squarely faced.

41. T. S. Eliot, “The Family Reunion,” in his Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), p. 291.

42. Frithjof Schuon’s essay “The Contradiction of Relativism” in his Logic and Transcendence (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) hashelped me crystallize the thoughts I set down in the next several paragraphs.

43. E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 5.

44. I suspect that the approach I am following—my methodology, if you will—is clear by now, but let me state it explicitly. In place of ourusual tendency to begin with the accepted world and add to it only what collective evidence requires, I am asking if it would harm usto conjure the most interesting world we can, and then drop from it what reason advises us to erase. There is some resemblance toAnselm’s credo ut intelligam, “I believe in order to understand.” Or as Wilfred Smith, using current idiom to get at what credomeant in the Middle Ages, paraphrases Anselm, “I get involved in order to understand.”

45. Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., p. 57; emphasis added.

46. Mortimer Adler, Aristotle for Everybody (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), p. 174.

47. See note 13, p. 258.

48. W. W. Bartley, III, in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Paul Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974), 2:675.

49. K. Parker, “The Effects of Subliminal Merging Stimuli on the Academic Performance of College Students,” Ph.D. dissertation, NewYork University, 1977; reported in Lloyd Silverman, “Two Unconscious Fantasies and Mediators of Successful Psychotherapy,”Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice 16, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 220.

50. Lloyd Silverman, “A Comprehensive Report of Studies Using the Subliminal Psychodynamic Activation Method,” issued by the NewYork Veterans Administration Regional Office and Research Center for Mental Health, New York University, 1980, p. 14.

51. L. H. Silverman, F. Lachman, and R. Milich, The Search for Oneness (New York: International Universities Press, 1982). I amindebted to a former student, Robert Ebert, for calling my attention to the whole matter.

52. Manfred Stanley, “Beyond Progress: Three Post-Political Futures,” in Images of the Future, ed. Robert Bundy (Buffalo: PrometheusBooks, 1976), pp. 115–16. I have used this and the three quotations that follow in other essays, but enter them again because I haveencountered no others, penned from within the MWM itself, that bring out the issues quite as sharply.

53. Manfred Stanley, “Beyond Progress: Three Post-Political Futures” in Images of the Future, ed. Robert Bundy (Buffalo: PrometheusBooks, 1976), pp. 115–16, as previously quoted on p. 96 of this book.

54. Ernest Gellner. The Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 207, as previously quoted on p. 89 ofthis book.

55. Ibid., pp. 206–7.

56. Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (New York: Viking Press, 1979), p. 87.

57. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 164.

58. T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday,” in his Complete Poems and Plays, p. 60.

Chapter Eleven

1. For the qualifications that are needed to make this statement strictly accurate but which do not affect the central point, see pages 77–78.

2. For the way controversies throughout the world are increasingly being fought across this battle line, see Walt Anderson, The Futureof Belief (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).

3. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).

4. In the philosophy of science, “all facts are theory laden”(N. R. Hanson), and “the meaning of every term we use depends upon thetheoretical context in which it occurs” (Paul Feyerabend).

5. The same can be said of the name for the position. Ground or tinted glasses affect our vision, but no one thinks they create what wesee. As construction is equivalent to creation here, unrelieved constructivism turns out to be a brand of creationism—one that is as

implausible as the evolutionary version that capitalizes its name.

6. David Pears, The New Republic, May 19, 1986, p. 39. Mention of Wittgenstein (the most influential philosopher of the twentiethcentury) elicits a comment on the role he played in getting us into our Postmodern, holistic predicament—not because of what holismasserts, but because of what it obscures by leaving unasked. Wittgenstein moved to his forms-of-life after concluding that sciencecould not be grounded in the Vienna Circle’s indubitable certainties of logic and sense data because such certainties do not exist. Themove marked a major gain; the question concerns its stopping point. If science requires foundations—the forms-of-life Wittgensteinplausibly proposed—why should we suppost that forms-of-life (cultural-linguistic wholes) do not?

7. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London & New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 3.

8. Feminists, whose cause Deconstructionists think they are supporting, are beginning themselves to ask this question.

Rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment…are not fictions or figurations that admit of the free play of signification[a favorite Deconstructionist phrase]. The victim’s account of these experiences is not simply an arbitrary imposition of apurely fictive meaning on an otherwise meaningless reality. A victim’s knowledge of the event may not be exhaustive…but it would be premature to conclude from the incompleteness of the victim’s account that all other accounts…areequally valid or that there are no objective grounds on which to distinguish between truth and falsity in divergentinterpretations (Mary Hawkesworth, “Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth” Signs 12:555).

Nominalism threatens to wipe out feminism itself (Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism,” Signs13:419).

Should postmodernism’s seductive text gain ascendancy, it will not be an accident that power remains in the hands of thewhite males who currently possess it. In a world of radical inequality, relativist resignation reinforces the status quo(Evelyn Fox Keller, in a course on feminist theory, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 1989).

S. P. Mohanty generalizes this point to show that it does not apply to feminism only:

To believe that you have your space and I mine; to believe, further, that there can be no responsible way in which I canadjudicate between your space—cultural and historical—and mine…is to assert that all spaces are equivalent; that theyhave equal value I end by denying that I need to take you seriously (Yale Journal of Criticism 2:14).

I am indebted to Priscilla Stuckey-Kaufmann for directing me to the statements I have here quoted.

9. Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Image Books, 1959), pp. 46–47.

10. Another analogy suggests itself: Deconstructionists are the Gödels among us. While mathematicians were trying to establishcompleteness, Gödel established incompleteness. Since there can be no system that is complete and consistent, it is impossible thatany one system has all the truth and other voices should be listened to.

11. H. Stapp, “Bell’s Theorem and World Process,” Il Nuovo Cimento, 29B (1975), p. 271.

12. Reported in Darold Treffert, “An Unlikely Vertuoso” The Sciences, January/February 1989, p. 31.

13. “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else is to me so great anabsurdity that…no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it” (Isaac Newton, asquoted in Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (New York: William Morrow, 1979), p. 49.

14. Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, Mind over Machine (New York: The Free Press, 1986), p. xiv.

15. A striking example: Japanese chicken sexers are able to decide with 99 percent accuracy the sex of a chick, even though the femaleand male genitalia of young chicks are ostensibly indistinguishable. No analytic approach to learning the art could ever approach suchaccuracy. Aspiring chicken sexers learn only by looking over the shoulders of experienced workers, who themselves cannot explainhow they do it. The most thorough discussion of this matter appears in Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, Mind over Machine (New York:The Free Press/ Macmillan, 1986).

16. Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).

17. “Reason is…the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (Treatise of HumanNature, II, iii, 3). Before Hume, Hobbes had proposed that “the Thoughts are to the Desires, as Scouts, and Spies, to range abroad,and find the way to the Things Desired” (Leviathan [Oxford 1960] Ch. 8, p. 46).

18. See Marjorie Grene, “Perception, Interpretation, and the Sciences,” in D. Depaw & B. Weber, Evolution at a Crossroads(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

Chapter Twelve

1. I could get where I want to go through any of the great traditions, but having started with India’s, I shall continue with them wherehistorical pointers seem helpful.

2. One of the most interesting and original recent critiques of this most universal separate self-delusion is to be found in Alex Comfort’sI and That (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979). Many studies now approach this subject in terms of both Asian and Westernthought, but few (in addition) draw recent science as ably into the discussion as does this one.

3. Irmgard Schloegel, The Wisdom of the Zen Masters (New York: New Directions, 1975), p. 21.

Chapter Thirteen

1. In 1960, the Creationists were not yet visible on the national scene.

2. See my “Human versus Artificial Intelligence,” in John Roslansky, ed., The Human Mind (Amsterdam: North Holland PublishingCo., 1967).

3. John Ciardi, “The White Heron” in I Marry You (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958). Used by permission of theauthor.

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Praise for Huston Smith’s

BEYOND THE POSTMODERN MIND

A welcome and profound antidote to the spiritual desert of postmodern thought. Filled with witand insight, these essays are as fresh and relevant today as they were when first written.

—Neal Grossman, Ph.D., author of Healing the Mind: The Philosophy of Spinoza Adapted for aNew Age

To a contemporary culture rich in intellectual brilliance but poor in humane wisdom, HustonSmith brings wide-ranging scholarship, philosophical acumen, and a courageous, good-humoredcommitment to exploring the fundamental issues of human experience. He is a true sage with amind equal to anyone s and a heart as large as the world.

—Leroy S. Rouner, Director, Boston University Institute for Philosophy and Religion

Among our leading philosophers of religion and science, Huston Smith demonstrates powerfullythe importance of the spiritual for our human situation today. In the process, and with a sure butoften light touch, he annihilates the nihilism of modern scientism and deconstructs thedeconstructionism of postmodern relativism.

—Douglas Sloan, Professor of History and Education Emeritus, Teachers College, ColumbiaUniversity

Highly recommended for both its exploration of the boundaries of science and its ability to elicitsufficient doubt that one can ask: Are we dangerously, and perhaps unnecessarily, living within arestricted worldview?

—Dennis Ford, Roanoke Times and World News

Highly intelligent…well-written, with just that dash of humor that moves us beyond theintransigent science on which we order our lives.

—Book Reader